Slashdot Mirror
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."
Another reason to buy physical CDs/DVDs rather than downloads.
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.
...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.