Actually they do change the costs. In time the costs will come down but it takes longer to encode the UHD source into UHD elementary streams and it takes longer to grade and it takes longer to render and more space to store.
In the real world, the extra time it takes is not paid. You get paid for the job. And prices are not going up, they are crashing down. The only thing that costs extra is the storage space (which is also coming down in price).
I must be living in a fake world because that is my world and while costs are coming down vendors still need to get paid for creating a different version of the film and do charge based on encoding parameters, ingest, storage, QC, compression, muxing, mux qc, etc. The UHD BD SKUs also come with the rec709 blu-ray, and digital copy.
Par for the course. Intelligent managers of the movie studios have a greed factor that is unbelievable. You can go to see a film for less than that. These are the same people who thought the video tape would never work for films. 4K is not that impressive.
Soli said: [...] if I were Apple I'd be weighing the costs of renecoding all those titles
Does Apple do the encoding? Isn't the supplier responsible for delivering the file in an ITS-compatible format?
Godo question. I've never been able to get a great answer as to when that happens but iTS content seems so consistence that I wonder if Apple does their own check instead of letting each studio/distributor do the final codec and container setup. Maybe Apple gives them a program to use. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I can't validate their numbers, but 65% sounds like it would qualify as "mainstream" to me. Would one say that Facebook isn't mainstream despite all accounts only accounting for about 30% of all humans? I would.
I've personally training every family member and most friends to use a VPN. They don't need to understand anything other than when they're on a public WiFi network of any kind that they should enable it, which is really easy with iOS apps.
Soli said: [...] if I were Apple I'd be weighing the costs of renecoding all those titles
Does Apple do the encoding? Isn't the supplier responsible for delivering the file in an ITS-compatible format?
Godo question. I've never been able to get a great answer as to when that happens but iTS content seems so consistence that I wonder if Apple does their own check instead of letting each studio/distributor do the final codec and container setup. Maybe Apple gives them a program to use. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Almost everything I've ever purchased on the iTunes TV/movie store has been pretty good, but a couple glaring examples were so bad they messed up the "consistency" curve.
Like Ex Machina. During the power failure scenes the red background shows such severe banding that it's really distracting. The Blu-Ray doesn't have that problem.
The most recent season of Vikings is a disaster too. Every episode has several instances of severe breakup. It's so bad I considered requesting a refund.
The Ex Machina problem may be a limitation of the codec (my attempts to rip and transcode the Blu-Ray produced similar results), but the poor QC on Vikings makes me think the iTS may be just a retail outlet through which suppliers move content they've encoded themselves.
Soli said: [...] if I were Apple I'd be weighing the costs of renecoding all those titles
Does Apple do the encoding? Isn't the supplier responsible for delivering the file in an ITS-compatible format?
Godo question. I've never been able to get a great answer as to when that happens but iTS content seems so consistence that I wonder if Apple does their own check instead of letting each studio/distributor do the final codec and container setup. Maybe Apple gives them a program to use. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Almost everything I've ever purchased on the iTunes TV/movie store has been pretty good, but a couple glaring examples were so bad they messed up the "consistency" curve.
Like Ex Machina. During the power failure scenes the red background shows such severe banding that it's really distracting. The Blu-Ray doesn't have that problem.
The most recent season of Vikings is a disaster too. Every episode has several instances of severe breakup. It's so bad I considered requesting a refund.
The Ex Machina problem may be a limitation of the codec (my attempts to rip and transcode the Blu-Ray produced similar results), but the poor QC on Vikings makes me think the iTS may be just a retail outlet through which suppliers move content they've encoded themselves.
1) If it's with a lot of black on screen the lossy codecs will do their best, but none are great without a really high profile. Note that Blu-ray also uses the lossy H.264 codec, too. Since I haven't heard about HEVC resolving that issue I'm assuming that will still be the case, but maybe it will allow for higher profile so that it's mitigated.
2) I would always request a refund and explain exactly where the issue resides and what's wrong. Don't do it for the money, but to (hopefully) help make sure they future releases better. I don't even think they need to have someone watch every video from start to finish, they only need a program that can look for multiple frames that appear blocky or extra dark that a human eye can then look at to see if there is an actual problem with the encode. Maybe I'm asking too much from Apple and/or content owners, but this seems like it's mostly solvable with some basic tach.
It seems it may still take a rather long time before iTunes will release the 4K iTunes videos.
Why do you say that? We've recently seen signs that suggest availability of 4K video from iTunes is imminent. The leaked firmware for the HomePod included information about a 4K AppleTV. It's not much of a stretch to believe that such a device will be accompanied by 4K content.
Further, the topic of the article is negotiations between Apple and suppliers over pricing for 4K content. While that in itself does not send any signals about when it might become available, it does indicate that it's well past the stage of "thinking about it."
If you are hurry to experience the iTunes 4K videos, the feasible way is to to enhance the iTunes videos with 4K resolution. Personally I tried the DRM M4V Converter to convert iTunes videos to 4K videos, it works like a charm. I think you may want to have a try too.
Upconverting does not improve either the detail or the dynamic range of an existing video. It just makes it bigger. There's no way to magically create information that doesn't exist in the original. It's the same as just zooming in.
Since Apple products actually do a remarkably good job of scaling on the fly, the benefit of paying for software that essential just increases the storage space requirement for existing content is questionable at best.
Comments
I must be living in a fake world because that is my world and while costs are coming down vendors still need to get paid for creating a different version of the film and do charge based on encoding parameters, ingest, storage, QC, compression, muxing, mux qc, etc. The UHD BD SKUs also come with the rec709 blu-ray, and digital copy.
I can't validate their numbers, but 65% sounds like it would qualify as "mainstream" to me. Would one say that Facebook isn't mainstream despite all accounts only accounting for about 30% of all humans? I would.
I've personally training every family member and most friends to use a VPN. They don't need to understand anything other than when they're on a public WiFi network of any kind that they should enable it, which is really easy with iOS apps.
Like Ex Machina. During the power failure scenes the red background shows such severe banding that it's really distracting. The Blu-Ray doesn't have that problem.
The most recent season of Vikings is a disaster too. Every episode has several instances of severe breakup. It's so bad I considered requesting a refund.
The Ex Machina problem may be a limitation of the codec (my attempts to rip and transcode the Blu-Ray produced similar results), but the poor QC on Vikings makes me think the iTS may be just a retail outlet through which suppliers move content they've encoded themselves.
2) I would always request a refund and explain exactly where the issue resides and what's wrong. Don't do it for the money, but to (hopefully) help make sure they future releases better. I don't even think they need to have someone watch every video from start to finish, they only need a program that can look for multiple frames that appear blocky or extra dark that a human eye can then look at to see if there is an actual problem with the encode. Maybe I'm asking too much from Apple and/or content owners, but this seems like it's mostly solvable with some basic tach.
Further, the topic of the article is negotiations between Apple and suppliers over pricing for 4K content. While that in itself does not send any signals about when it might become available, it does indicate that it's well past the stage of "thinking about it."
Upconverting does not improve either the detail or the dynamic range of an existing video. It just makes it bigger. There's no way to magically create information that doesn't exist in the original. It's the same as just zooming in.
Since Apple products actually do a remarkably good job of scaling on the fly, the benefit of paying for software that essential just increases the storage space requirement for existing content is questionable at best.