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Apple iTunes Upsampling Higher Resolution Videos?
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has a revealing look at Apple upsampling some of their new 640x480 videos from lower quality 320x240 videos. In fact, their upsampling appears to produce lower quality videos than quickly upsampling yourself with Quicktime. The worst part may be that Apple is charging people to download these new higher resolution videos even if they've already purchased the original, so people are essentially paying for nothing."
This makes no sense. Apple could use quicktime on all of the videos with ease, or resample. But instead they make the quality worse then if they had used Quicktime. I don't see how Apple wouldn't have used Quicktime in the first place considering they made it. Computer time really isn't an issue for Apple.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Another reason to buy physical CDs/DVDs rather than downloads.
Apple made a big song and dance of the fact that you can transfer songs, and burn them to CD. Can you burn downloaded movies to DVD or are you restricted to play them on one or two devices?
To me, this is far more egregious than Sony's rootkit fiasco.
I've personally written software that had undesigned implications.
but...
I've never taken money, a second time, from anyone, knowing that I had already sold them that very same thing.
The difference is incompetance vs. intentional malice driven by greed.
I'll always choose to associate with a fool rather than someone I am certain is out to get me.
In other news, Apple was discovered to have upsampled regular commodity PCs into more expensive versions with no real additional benefits. A source at Apple revealed that their upsampling engine, code named "marketing", could turn any piece of crap hardware into something people would buy. Cited as their greatest achievement was the "iPod", a device that had been upsampled and resold over five times, with it's users apparently none the wiser.
You are becoming retarded. Stop it. Please.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
...as far as I know, encoding is handled not by Apple, but by the providers. Which, as a matter of fact, explains the discrepancy in the Engadget post: some videos look good at higher-res, whereas others appear to have been upsampled.
Most likely, not Apple is to blame, but the content providers, some of whom were apparently too lazy or stupid or stingy to provide truly higher-res versions.
It's one thing to be a fanboi, the it's far lamer to be a trendwhore, and you, my friend, have bought into the current anti-apple trend hook, line and sinker.
iTunes is the best music management software given away with any >1% market share digital audio software. Whine all you want, but that's a fact, even despite Apple's tendancy to release new versions with a few too many bugs.
If she's got no friends and no car and lives in the sticks, then that woman is fucked. How did she get an iPod in this situation anyway? I've had friends using iPods with Windows 98 computers without a problem. A Google search will provide you with countless Linux solutions. And street vendor - are you having a fucking brain aneurism?
This is pretty much one of the lowest, lamest, trendwhoriest posts I've ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying a lot. I hope your dick grew because you followed the trend to diss Apple's products and suckle up to Microsoft's Zune because it isn't an iPod even though it's a rebadge of a shitty Toshiba MP3 player. However what more could you expect from a lowly repair tech, then again it isn't as if you understand real world economics. Get a real fucking job, learn that it makes sense to have an iPod repair division when >75% of the market is iPods, and if a company is making 8 MILLION iPods a quarter, they can have leading-edge failure rates and you'd still get thousands of devices with issues. Also portable devices tend to have user-failure issues such as being dropped, etc, hence they'll be brought in for repair more often than other devices.
Even if content providers are responsible for encoding the files (which I doubt) Apple should still be professional and ensure they meet a certain standard. It just makes them look bad.