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."

Why?

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.

Re:Why?

Apple doesn't do the upsampling, their content providers do. Blame Apple for not putting more pressure on them (although Apple are still in the 'beggars cant be choosers' stage here, so they probably cant put any pressure on at all), blame the providers for crappy quality.

Re:Why?

"Apple doesn't do the upsampling, their content providers do."

Actually, in this case, I believe they are doing the upsampling. Generally, the larger labels really don't care about reencoding what they've already put up there -- they only care about getting the new stuff up there.

I'm not sure why everyone thought that just because there is a new format, everything was going to be magically resubmitted to Apple.

At the same time, a good friend of mine just sent a note stating his lable just got word from Apple that at least the audio components of the iTS (I guess its no longer the iTMS) are going to need uploaded in Apple Lossless Format. Does this mean Apple is looking forward to holding the uncompressed files and transmitting compressed or are they going to do the lossless files to the customer? He didn't know because the note said nothing about it.

Personally, I've never worried about the quality of the videos and all that. The videos are almost always better than I get from my local cable station...whatever that may be. After Battlestar went iTMS last year, I stopped doing the torrent thing and bought them from Apple (I also bought them on DVD, so I was never worried about the torrent stuff...I buy when I have a legal alternative). The iTMS vids were lesser quality than the torrents, *BUT* you never really noticed unless you were either completely anal or had paused a shot. Either way, the content of the show was there and it wasn't like Apple was providing an abridged version of the content. Same with music...as a former professional musician (and by that, I don't mean I've played a few bars) I've never really worried about CD vs. MP3 and I know very few pros that do. I use to get all sorts of promos and prereleases and everything else on CD...now they all send URLs to pick up the MP3s and they are happy with what it is. The last time I got a CD was at a release party and even then it was hinted that since I wasn't a journalist, there were only limited copies available.

This just goes back to content over 'quality'. Bad pop music with a limited lifespan? Yeah, it better be 100% lossless and the video at HD quality -- I'm going to get sick of it with each passing listen, so it needs to be perfect each time or I'll discard it that much faster. True classics? Well, I just transfered some shitty reel to reel studio outtake from an old blues guitarist that had molded up in someones basement to digital...there are dropouts and songs that just end and a general dampness about the sound that distorts it and makes it sound like its playing through wet cardboard...and its PERFECT. I couldn't imagine listening to this in any other format.

I guess this is the difference between consumers and creators. Consumers can't add anything to what they buy...creators will fill in the blanks in their head and be satisfied without whinging endlessly about getting ripped off.

I've ranted too long on this subject...

Re:Why?

Actually, in this case, I believe they are doing the upsampling.

Nope. Everything you can download from the iTMS today was submitted by the labels.

At the same time, a good friend of mine just sent a note stating his lable just got word from Apple that at least the audio components of the iTS (I guess its no longer the iTMS) are going to need uploaded in Apple Lossless Format. Does this mean Apple is looking forward to holding the uncompressed files and transmitting compressed or are they going to do the lossless files to the customer?

Neither. It means that Apple's getting too many complaints about the labels botching the conversion, so they want to do the compression in-house for quality control.

-jcr

Re:Why?

Upsampling will not put more information in the picture. It just makes it look better. Possibly Apple is using the same way to upsample the video as you'd do yourself using Quicktime. However, when they have to recompress the video to distribute the upsampled video, there will be another round of quality loss. This is probably what makes the video from Apple look worse than just upsampling yourself.

Re:Why?

I don't understand why they didn't forsee that one day i-pod screens would be larger, so they should keep everything in its native size (the largest SD resolution possible). I work at a mobile content company and we make video ringtones, but we have copies of all are videos at the highest resolution, because we know that one day cell phones and mobile devices will be able to handle the higher resolutions. It prevents us from having to re-edit all those videos. When the time comes, I just run a simple batch and all are videos are ready.

What's the point of paying twice?

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

What are the terms of use for videos on iTMS

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?

Re:What are the terms of use for videos on iTMS

You're not allowed to burn downloaded videos to a video DVD, but you can back them up as a file to a DVD and play it again on iTunes.

This is a restriction imposed on Apple by the video owners, and was pretty much the only way they could get video on the iTunes Store at all. Hopefully they're still negotiating to have that particular block removed.

moral implications

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.

Upsampling

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.

Message to Apple:

You are becoming retarded. Stop it. Please.

Not to be an Apple apologist, but...

...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.

Re:Not to be an Apple apologist, but...

...as far as I know, encoding is handled not by Apple, but by the providers.

That is correct. This has been confirmed to me personally on several occasions by iTMS staff.

-jcr

They're still the ones selling them

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.

Reminds me of waxless floors

We always need a continous stream of new products to consume. I'm old enough to remember an innovation called "waxless floors" that would save money on maintenance costs as tough shiney flooring could merely be swept with a broom. Then, Johnson wax company come out with a new product we dubbed "waxless wax." It was for shining your waxless floors.

This illustrates my problem with pay for download

I'd prefer reasonable prices for the DVDs and CDs. Paying for content that has been compressed and indexed in a manner that may or may not suit your needs seems pretty stupid to me. Charge reasonable prices for the stuff and then let me use it however works best for me under existing fair use laws. Get rid of the DRM, charge a fair price. Maybe people would buy more of it then.

iTunes has turned to crap

Personally, I am not too fond of iTunes anymore as it is. And, I'm actually losing favor with Apple. But I updated iTunes to 7 the other day, and aside from it being somewhat simpler looking, it's alot slower than previous versions, and I've also had issues with it not playing songs (Playing a song until it reaches the end, and then not finishing the song or changing the song, and manually changing song only ends up with that song starting at 00:00 and not playing at all). I've never actually used the iTunes Music Store (er... video store, whatever they call it now) aside from previewing songs for CD's that I would actually buy hard copies of. And even then, the samples they use, at times are not that good. So having low-quality videos does not surprise me. I love my iPod, and there was a time when I loved iTunes. But I guess that was back when the iPod wasn't a media-hog do-it-all portable media center. "Back in the day" when all an iPod did was play music, and all iTunes did was play music. iTunes and Quicktime were relatively seperated and it worked fine. I think sometimes Apple needs to realize when a system is broken, and when it isn't... But then again, so should alot of people.
GR

True to form

Look, Apple has always emphasized design, appearance and usability. And they have always catered to the less technical among us ("computers for the rest of us)". Of course that doesn't mean their machines don't also appeal to techies. In fact now that they don't carry as steep a price penalty, and now that it is possible to dual boot to Windows, their appeal has grown in that regard. But still their bread-and-butter is people who don't want to fuss with their PCs and who don't want to become computer geeks. This upsampled "hi-res" video ploy, then, would seem to indicate that Apple knows their clientele is largely technically uninformed, and so they believe they can get away with it. Sure, some techies will notice and scream (witness this forum), but frankly most of Apple's customers are not techies, and most don't even associate with techies. That's one big reason why they bought Apple in the first place.

RTFA - It's only some of the viedos...

Which means that it is probably either the content providers who are not going back to the maters to encode high quality, or it is stuff that Apple probably doesn't have access to the originals, which then the shouldn't re-sell it.

My guess is that it's the content providers who haven't re-encoded. I don't see Apple as being *that* dumb.

What retailer on earth inspects every item?

Best Buy is one of the largest retailers in the world, yet one out of every five or ten DVD's I purchase from them is defective. I gurarantee you they do not inspect stock from the distributors and subdistributors. In this case, I inspect the discs at the purchasing counter. I have held up other customers in the process... one of them may be you.

The Gap is one of the largest clothing retailers in the world, and one out of every three shirts I have purchased from them ends up discoloring badly in the wash in just a few months. Even though the clothing is their own brand, I guarantee you they do not inspect every shirt for quality. I no longer buy shirts from the Gap... Incidentally, I haven't had a problem with the Faconnable or Ralph Lauren polo shirts I paid $40-$70 for... you get what you pay for.

Apple is one of the largest retailers of online music downloads with global load-balanced hosting operations worldwide, and every 50 to 75 downloads I come across a music track that is encoded from a defective source. I guarantee you Apple does not inspect the contents of every item published to its library. Incidentally I've had even fewer problems with purchased physical CD's, or better yet, DVD-Audio, but I find there's a level of quality I'll accept to take advantage of certain conveniences over going out to the store and paying $20-$25 for a DVD-Audio disc.

Now, mind you I'm not defending Apple but I'm saying they're not unique at all in this regard. Obviously if there's a considerably high frequency of upsampled videos, then they've either got a problem they weren't aware of ... or this is simply something they accepted and are willing to deal with it as long as customers are. The solution is to complain to Apple in a constructive way so they have an idea of what customers really want.

If the majority doesn't care then the majority doesn't care... and Apple will offer products as they see fit. I don't recall anywhere in Apple documentation that they ever stated that products in the 640x480 library were remastered from the source. So, all the energy expended whining here on slashdot about it should be spent sending complaints to Apple so that they get the picture and do what needs to be done to retain their bottom line. If a large enough percentage of consumers call them on this, they will change their practice and require all 640x480 content to be remastered... but don't expect them to be inspecting the contents of every file submitted to them, as the process to verify whether or not the content is upsampled cannot be derived from looking at the metadata... Each file would have to be inspected manually, at length. The end result is that you'd have to wait a hell of a lot longer for new releases and you'd be paying much more for them to make up the difference in labor expenditures. Then again, if you're willing to pay $10 a single and wait until three weeks after its initial release to obtain it, who am I to question?

and so begins...

...M$'s Zune "grassroots" campaign...

hey, it's doing wonders against Sony! Apple is next in line...

Worst part

"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"

Weren't they doing that when they paid for the original?

Huh?

Jobs said that you would be getting the new resolution videos for free as long as you had purchased them before. I've been getting mine for free and the picture quality was an improvement. I wonder if it's the studios involved in the process that are doing it wrong.

Upsampled or just piss-poor encoding?

In the Madonna video, the background circles actually do look better (more round and evenly coloured) in the iTunes video. In the Elton John video, the faces in the dark background look better (the "main" face on the right has more grain and the face on the left is slightly more visible). This seems to indicate that there is more information in the hi-res versions, just not in the right places. I'm not an expert with modern video encoders, but could it be that whoever did the encoding of the video did a poor job at properly allocating the bits to the relevant portions of the image?

So Much Ignorance, So Little Knowledge

I'm not surprised this Engadget piece was picked up by Digg in the usual OMG!!!!@#!!!!111!!! fashion, but here on slashdot? C'mon, guys.

Apple doesn't do any of the encoding. They provide a software kit for the vendors to do that. This is obviously a case where vendors have cheaped out. And are we surprised? Oh no! The same people who support the RIAA have unethically upsampled low quality vids to make believe they are high quality! They're ripping off their customers! Like this is news?

Have any of these people who repurchased upsampled music been given the brush off by Apple? Now THAT would be news. But in this day of fly off the handle news reporting I shouldn't be surprised this made front page on Digg.com. I am disappointed slashdot editors didn't show any savvy before posting the very same news story. This is debunked in digg.com AND Engadget comments. If common sense didn't prevail a moment of research would have shown this to be simple link baiting by Engadget. Again.

Apple? Say it ain't so!

I, for one, am *shocked*!

This mirrors the level of experience I've had with

... with Apple and video on Itunes:

see
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179695&c id=14886135 [slashdot.org]

Never did buy any more video from Apple; probably won't.

Not only upconverted, but recompressed

It's even worse. Look at the examples in the article. The upconverted versions have big rectangular compression artifacts. So not only were they upconverted, they were decompressed and recompressed, which generates terrible artifacts. (See most files on YouTube for examples.) If they'd just been upconverted from low-rez source material, they'd just be blurry.

Re:What?

At least RTF Summary...

Re:Am I the only one

What are you waiting for, there are already several linux distros that can install on your powerbook ;-)

Re:What?

But what if someone sold you that same 200mhz PC rebranded as a 2x2.33 GHz Merom? That's what Apple is doing, so before you go into asshat mode try RTFA.

Re:What?

There aren't any. Pentium, Pentium MMX, Pentium Pro, AMD K6, Cyrix 6x86MX (PR rating), Cyrix MII (200MHz, PR233) Centaur WinChip ran at 200MHz, not including the 6x86MX PR200.

Re:Am I the only one

High-res videos from iTunes run fine on my 28-month-old PowerBook. Maybe there's something wrong with yours?

And do you really think Apple is releasing episodes of the Daily Show late on purpose? What possible motivation would they have? Just to piss you off? It's certainly not because they're greedy and looking for profits - this obviously causes them to lose sales. More likely, Comedy Central is slow at actually sending the episodes to Apple.

Re:Am I the only one

Not to mention Apple's policy of "we will give it to you when we give it to you"

That's not Apple's policy. If you want your shows in a more timely manner, write to the networks that own them.

-jcr

Re:Apple Poopy Video Quality For Walmart

I'm not an Apple apologist but I'll give it a try...

"According to Cringley - Apple has to keep video quality POOPY to please Walmart."

Just because Cringely offers an opinion for sale doesn't mean it's true. Furthermore, he never described the video quality as "POOPY". What he said was:

"Apple deliberately repositioned its movie offerings to be better than broadcast quality but less than DVD quality and quite a bit less than HD-quality."

- http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060914. html [pbs.org]

Better than broadcast quality isn't poopy. DVD rips that are recompressed are less than DVD quality too and that's what you typically see on P2P networks. In fact, they are typically less than 640x480.

"According to Streaming.com 2006 video transcoding study, Apple's video is POOPY to begin with - in comparison to Real."

Perhaps "in comparison to Real" but that doesn't make it POOPY. Here is the announcement:

http://www.streamingmedia.com/press/view.asp?id=43 36 [streamingmedia.com]

The reports themselves are for sale. You may buy them if you like.

No matter, since this was a streaming video codec study, not a downloadable one. The results of these tests say nothing about the quality you can get from video purchased from the iTunes store.

"So we get POOPY on top of POOPY. Quite a dog pile!"

That wouldn't be true in any case. Neither of your claims are actually true, but even if they were, you could only claim that the result was "POOPY" not "POOPY on top of POOPY". Apple could have achieved "POOPY" by using their "POOPY" codec. They wouldn't need to make it "POOPIER" still.

"The Streaming.com study mentioned above - stated that Micro$oft's WindowsMedia video sucked even more than Apple's H.264 and that folks interested in video needed to forget about Micro$oft."

It didn't say that either. It said "Companies using or considering Windows Media really need to evaluate other technologies." and it never said that any other the tested products "sucked". As I said before, this was a streaming video test and doesn't represent what is achievable in different formats.

Re:Am I the only one

Troll much? I have a Sawtooth G4 with an upgraded CPU to 1.4GHz 1.5GB PC100 SDRAM and I can run the videos completely fine. They look as good as any SDTV rips I've downloaded. Your Powerbook if you even really have one has DDR RAM and a faster system bus than my computer and mine plays videos just fine.