iTunes HD videos low bitrate, include iPod-ready versions

124

Comments

  • Reply 61 of 96
    tenobelltenobell Posts: 7,014member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by JeffDM View Post


    Just because a lot of people do it, doesn't mean it's a good idea. Drive failures happen just frequently enough that it's simply a bad idea to depend on one drive to store important information.



    Well look at the reality. We all store very important information on hard drives. Outside of its possibility, how many people do you know actually have lost important information in a drive failure?





    Quote:

    How and at what cost? I've not found any way to recover data from most drive failures, but I've never bothered to send them out to a service.



    Their are so many moving parts in a drive that can fail. Many of them can fail without causing damage the information stored on the platter.



    Yes it can be quiet costly to recover the data.
  • Reply 62 of 96
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bigdaddyp View Post


    I would love to comment on the quality of the Hd. downloads but unfortunately I can't. Itunes downloads both the Hd. version and the standard version of the show. Unfortunately itunes can not find the Hd version.



    This happened to 2 of my first 15 downloads. A quick hard drive search for the title recovered it. Double-click played, and when I closed the show the "!" symbol that first identified the problem went away. Not sure why it happened, where the file went (I should have looked, but after selecting it worked I (perhaps stupidly) stopped worrying about it), or how to prevent.



    Not sure if you faced the frozen machine issues I did while downloading, but after I was forced repeatedly to restart my Mac, I wasn't surprised to have a couple hiccups in the files once all was said and done.



    Good luck!
  • Reply 63 of 96
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Hudson1 View Post


    We're talking television programs here. None are broadcast in 1080P as they are all 1080i or 720P, depending on network. BluRay Disc is a movie-only format so I don't know why anyone would be trying to say Apple is making a mistake by not offering TV shows with BD quality. They don't exist anyway.



    Blu-Ray is not a movie-only format. Television Series are also available on Blu-Ray, and most (if not all) are presented in 1080p (even though they're only broadcast at 1080i or 720p).



    And it's not a mistake on Apple's part that their HD content is nowhere near Blu-Ray quality; bandwidth and end-user storage capacity limitations wouldn't allow them to offer such a thing even if they wanted to. It's just important that people realize that when they're paying for internet-served HD, they're making a serious trade-off in quality for convenience. And considering it takes longer to download and sync to your Apple TV than it would to take a trip to Best Buy, it's not really all that convenient anyhow.





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TenoBell View Post


    Well yes I would say its mostly rare for a DVD to get scratched to the point of not working. My point was that it can happen. On the same token its not as if HDD frequently fail either. Generally we commonly keep far more valuable information stored on HDD than on DVD.



    Their are a couple of different reasons a HDD can fail that does not necessarily mean the data is lost. In most instances the data can be reclaimed.



    To keep this from dragging on too long. We can acknowledge that their are pluses and minuses to both solutions. Without the need to overstate either one.



    But every hard drive will fail, it's only a matter of time. And when software repair fails, data recovery from a terabyte-or-more drive can cost tens of thousands of dollars! Which is why keeping all of your $20-a-piece eggs in one inevitably-exploding basket is a bad idea. Couple that with the fact that you're settling for a fraction of the quality, and I question why anyone would purchase bulk HD content online at this stage in the game.



    When the internet is ready for fast 25GB-per-movie downloads, and terabyte-sized solid state storage is cheap — or Apple lets you freely redownload lost purchases — then diskless HD delivery will make sense.
  • Reply 64 of 96
    Apple needs to take steps to make data backup painless
  • Reply 65 of 96
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by nagromme View Post


    Apple needs to take steps to make data backup painless



    If only there was some app that would let you go back in time to grab files that you mistaken throwaway or to restore from an external drive. In only...
  • Reply 66 of 96
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    What's this talk about saving space by not doing 1080p for TV shows? What about 1080i? 1080i is actually more information than 1080p. 1080p typically refers to 24fps while 1080i refers to 60fields or 30fps.



    I suppose that TV shows shot on film could be unmolested 24fps all the way from filming to our eyeballs. But somehow I suspect that we'll be getting the 30fps version from Apple anyway. And it wouldn't matter either because pretty much nobody has a 72hz or 120hz display in addition to the proper software and supply chain to do 24fps. Hell, even the vast majority of 120hz TVs don't do proper 24fps.



    But I could be wrong... Iis any of the iTS content at 24fps? If not, comparison to 1080i would be better than to 1080p.
  • Reply 67 of 96
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TenoBell View Post


    I don't understand how this helps. Bandwidth is fine for SD downloads, HD is the problem.



    Blockbuster is testing kiosks in their stores that burn DVDs for rentals, vs. keeping excessive inventory in stock. You don't think having Apple kiosks in every grocery store, post office, corner store, airport, Starbucks, McDonalds, Target and Wal-Mart would be a great idea?



    If you could browse their content and quickly download directly to your device from these kiosks, there could be a huge amount of incremental business just waiting for Apple to pick up.
  • Reply 68 of 96
    solipsismsolipsism Posts: 25,726member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by SpamSandwich View Post


    Blockbuster is testing kiosks in their stores that burn DVDs for rentals, vs. keeping excessive inventory in stock. You don't think having Apple kiosks in every grocery store, post office, corner store, airport, Starbucks, McDonalds, Target and Wal-Mart would be a great idea?



    If you could browse their content and quickly download directly to your device from these kiosks, there could be a huge amount of incremental business just waiting for Apple to pick up.



    We already get music from Starbucks (as well as any open WiFi) so a Kiosk would be a great idea. Especially in airports. They could even sell iPods and accessories in vending machines. The Kiosks could even be more complex, being run by a single employee who is the center oyf an circle of many iTS terminals. These machines could even have fast chargers built in. Besides the impulse buys of bored travels Apple gets to help entrench their ecosystem in a way that Sony, SanDisk, Creative and MS can't compete with.
  • Reply 69 of 96
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dfiler View Post


    But I could be wrong... Iis any of the iTS content at 24fps? If not, comparison to 1080i would be better than to 1080p.



    Pretty sure Apple's HD content is 24fps, just like the broadcast. Anyhow, the quality issue with internet-served HD content isn't that it's 720p instead of 1080i or 1080p, but rather that it's bitrate is like 4mbps instead of 25 - 35mbps like Blu-Ray.
  • Reply 70 of 96
    tenobelltenobell Posts: 7,014member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Cory Bauer View Post


    But every hard drive will fail, it's only a matter of time. And when software repair fails, data recovery from a terabyte-or-more drive can cost tens of thousands of dollars! Which is why keeping all of your $20-a-piece eggs in one inevitably-exploding basket is a bad idea. Couple that with the fact that you're settling for a fraction of the quality, and I question why anyone would purchase bulk HD content online at this stage in the game.



    Very true a hard drive will fail given enough time. It comes down to how often do these failures actually occur to the point of causing such serious problems.



    The shift is already well under way with music. Its becoming more and more common for people to store all of their albums on hard drive and forgo buying physical media. So far after seven years we have not heard common horror stories of music collections being lost to hard drive failure.



    Quote:

    When the internet is ready for fast 25GB-per-movie downloads, and terabyte-sized solid state storage is cheap ? or Apple lets you freely redownload lost purchases ? then diskless HD delivery will make sense.



    Also most people rent movies rather than buying to permanently own. Renting forgoes the need to store media long term.
  • Reply 71 of 96
    tenobelltenobell Posts: 7,014member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dfiler View Post


    What's this talk about saving space by not doing 1080p for TV shows? What about 1080i? 1080i is actually more information than 1080p. 1080p typically refers to 24fps while 1080i refers to 60fields or 30fps.



    60 interlaced does offer more temporal resolution but does not account for any other factors that make a good image.



    Quote:

    I suppose that TV shows shot on film could be unmolested 24fps all the way from filming to our eyeballs. But somehow I suspect that we'll be getting the 30fps version from Apple anyway. And it wouldn't matter either because pretty much nobody has a 72hz or 120hz display in addition to the proper software and supply chain to do 24fps. Hell, even the vast majority of 120hz TVs don't do proper 24fps.



    24fps is actually below the threshold of persistent vision. Which means its too slow to fool your brain into thinking you are seeing natural motion. You will see the flicker of still images.



    Even if the original file is 24fps, the playback is at 48 fps and higher.
  • Reply 72 of 96
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TenoBell View Post


    Well look at the reality. We all store very important information on hard drives. Outside of its possibility, how many people do you know actually have lost important information in a drive failure?





    I have known several. I personally would have lost considerable information of my own if I didn't have a backup system.





    Quote:

    Their are so many moving parts in a drive that can fail. Many of them can fail without causing damage the information stored on the platter.



    Yes it can be quiet costly to recover the data.



    Then I would consider that "not really an option" except for those people where money is no object, for whom have no excuse to not have a backup system.





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TenoBell View Post


    The shift is already well under way with music. Its becoming more and more common for people to store all of their albums on hard drive and forgo buying physical media. So far after seven years we have not heard common horror stories of music collections being lost to hard drive failure.



    In fact, I've seen several such stories come up on different forums. What a lot of them end up doing is recovering what they can from their iPods, begging for people to tell them what they need to do to retrieve those files.
  • Reply 73 of 96
    tenobelltenobell Posts: 7,014member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by JeffDM View Post


    I have known several. I personally would have lost considerable information of my own if I didn't have a backup system.



    In fact, I've seen several such stories come up on different forums. What a lot of them end up doing is recovering what they can from their iPods, begging for people to tell them what they need to do to retrieve those files.



    I've acknowledged that it can and does happen. But this is no evidence to its frequency. I would say 90% of the people I know own one or more computers. Everyonce in a while I hear of someone saying their HDD crashed. It likely somewhere around 200 computers and someone has an HDD problem every couple of years.



    Is this anymore a problem than loosing media from scratched, corrupted, or lost discs. Which also can and does happen.
  • Reply 74 of 96
    nasseraenasserae Posts: 3,167member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TenoBell View Post


    Well look at the reality. We all store very important information on hard drives. Outside of its possibility, how many people do you know actually have lost important information in a drive failure?









    Their are so many moving parts in a drive that can fail. Many of them can fail without causing damage the information stored on the platter.



    Yes it can be quiet costly to recover the data.



    I lost 1 GB of priceless pictures as well as 5 years worth of work few years back when I used to use PCs due to HD a crash. The funny thing was that the crashed HD was a 1 year old secondary HD not the OS HD. I know it was my mistake and that's why now I am backing up to TC, External HD, and MobileMe. My wife thinks I am paranoid
  • Reply 75 of 96
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TenoBell View Post


    I've acknowledged that it can and does happen. But this is no evidence to its frequency. I would say 90% of the people I know own one or more computers. Everyonce in a while I hear of someone saying their HDD crashed. It likely somewhere around 200 computers and someone has an HDD problem every couple of years.



    Is this anymore a problem than loosing media from scratched, corrupted, or lost discs. Which also can and does happen.



    As an IT manager, it is quite common for people to come to me when their home or work computer is on the fritz. A few times every year I have to tell people that their data is lost unless they want to spend big bucks on recovering data from their failed harddrive. Only one guy, a free-lance designer, has decided to send their home computer's drive in for recovery. Apparently he had some valuable projects on it that justified the cost.



    Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean that it is uncommon. Most people just live with the loss and don't go around bragging about it.
  • Reply 76 of 96
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TenoBell View Post


    60 interlaced does offer more temporal resolution but does not account for any other factors that make a good image.







    24fps is actually below the threshold of persistent vision. Which means its too slow to fool your brain into thinking you are seeing natural motion. You will see the flicker of still images.



    Even if the original file is 24fps, the playback is at 48 fps and higher.



    The interlacing you see on most TV shows is that of normal frames split perfectly into two fields. Only live broadcasts are every temporally accurate individual fields... and i'm not sure if even that is true anymore. For one, any show shot on film has no greater temporal accuracy by going the interlaced route. (most primetime scripted programming)



    Next, while you are correct about 24fps being too slow for convincing motion pictures, it isn't played back at 48fps except in movie theaters with real projectors. These projects do flash the same frame twice in succession. However this isn't true for any other type of display. Other displays just hold the image for a 24th of a second. Except that most displays don't have a refresh rate that is a multiple of 24. Granted phosphorous glow of CRT screen elements do decay in brightness between scans. But they aren't really flashing the frame twice either.



    Anyway, how this pertains to iTS is that I'm curious which content is at native frame rate. Are any shows encoded at 24fps. (not that I have a display that is capable of temporally accurate playback of 24fps content. (the iMac and mac portables aren't capable)



    It would be nice though if apple were forward thinking enough to provide iTS video content at native frame rate, knowing that someday people might be able to take advantage of it.
  • Reply 77 of 96
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Cory Bauer View Post


    I watched the free episode of Monk last night on my Apple TV, and the quality was without a doubt below broadcast HD and in my opinion not as clean as an upconverted DVD. Lots of artifacts, lots of noise, and short on sharpness. Previewing the free episode of Heroes, the same appears to hold true.



    I have to admit I haven't downloaded a TV show, just movies.

    I'm also wondering if you definitely got the HD version - or did you purchase via the shopping cart which seems to be sending people the SD version (as discussed 10-15 posts above).



    The quality of broadcast FTA changes in different areas too. As I understand it, the cable networks recompress FTA HD to a lower bitrate, while the broadcast FTA is usually clearer. In Australia we get about 12Mbps MPEG2 on FTA HD, and I think that's compressed on the fly during transmission. In comparison iTunes' HD is 4.5Mbps MPEG4, pre compressed.
  • Reply 78 of 96
    tenobelltenobell Posts: 7,014member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dfiler View Post


    Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean that it is uncommon. Most people just live with the loss and don't go around bragging about it.



    This is all mostly based on perception. But I don't see it as being that much of a problem. If hard drive failure were all that common, general use of computers themselves would be an unreliable roll of the dice. Most computers are in use for years with no hard drive problems.



    This can go across any mechanical device that can break at any time. Some of them do, but for the most part quality mechanical devices are reliable and last for a long time.
  • Reply 79 of 96
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dfiler View Post


    The interlacing you see on most TV shows is that of normal frames split perfectly into two fields. Only live broadcasts are every temporally accurate individual fields... and i'm not sure if even that is true anymore. For one, any show shot on film has no greater temporal accuracy by going the interlaced route. (most primetime scripted programming)



    I really don't get the controversy over 1080i vs. 1080p. Interlaced scan was adopted in 1939 because if they scanned the screen once in 1/30 of a second (or worse yet 1/24) they had to use a phosphor with such long "linger" that thrown baseballs looked like comets, for example. So, they scanned the screen 60 times per second, odd lines then even, so they could use faster-decaying phosphors. The advantage of interlacing is relevant only to CRTs. With LCDs and other modern display panels, that stay the same until they're updated each frame, it doesn't matter what order they're scanned in, and there's no advantage in updating them twice with the same information. I think people need to revise their thinking to catch up with the new technology.
  • Reply 80 of 96
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    I have the free episode of Battlestar Galactica. The HD file is 720p It is definitely crisper than the SD version but definitely not up to the quality of the HD DVDs of the first season. It's hard to do frame grabs, no way to step frames so screen caps match the same frame.
Sign In or Register to comment.