iTunes 1080p Content Comes Close to Blu-ray Quality, But Can't Quite Match

[kyjaotkb]

I may not be representative but I stopped buying BluRays 2years ago.

Between DIVX via Airvideo > Ipad > Apple TV and soon Airplay in OSX direct to Aplle TV and Netflix, optical media is dead to me unless someone buys it as a gift

Great solution.
Next time you're buying a car, I guess you'll bypass the "going to the dealer" and "getting a credit from the bank" steps and go directly to the step where you rip open your neighbour's Prius with a crowbar and drive it for a ride.

Oh - and I forgot - unless someone buys it for you as a gift of course !

 

[WilliamG]

The second image is much more revealing. It's part of the reason I think HDTV is a bit of a joke: The amount of mosquito noise in dark scenes is ghastly. For some people with smaller TVs this may not be as big an issue, but we live in a more modern world these days with home theater projectors that are more affordable, and this sort of image is unacceptable when shown on a larger screen.

And that doesn't even take into account the other issues due to lack of bit-rate...

 

[Asclepio]

so those ripped pixelate movies are perfect for a "damaged human's retina"

 

[perealb]

The good question is: what is the best quality for video downloading/streaming at the moment? You can bitch all you want but those things are not perfect at first. Besides that, with the current limitations, it is not worth to match or surpass blue-ray quality yet because of the amount of data it would take to transfer or stream a file. It's just not possible with the internet speeds that most people currently have.

 

[MadeTheSwitch]

Perhaps I'm in the minority - but I appreciate good design from packaging to "clever" menus to the actual content. I would have thought many posters on here would appreciate good design. But maybe too many are too into immediate satisfaction.

I'm also someone who stays and watches the credits.

I also appreciate the tons of extras on blu-rays which sometimes/rarely make it to the iTunes store. (directors commentary, PiP story boards, etc)

So again - for me - blu-ray wins. Without question.

Wins for me too. I LIKE the menus. They give a disc personality and usually correspond to the theme of the movie. I like the extras too. Additionally, a themed box set is much more personable of a gift then an iTunes giftcard.

Why some of you want to abandon all of that puzzles me. You want to lose all the extras? You rather give an impersonal giftcard then a box set with all the little packaging extras that the movie lover will appreciate? Really?

Not to mention all the people who would lose their jobs if everything will digital...graphic artist, packaging designers....not all change is for the better.

 

[ugahairydawgs]

So when crap comes from Apple, it's good for the masses, but if comes from Microsoft or Adobe or anyone else, it's bad.

My point was more that for most this wouldn't be considered crap.

Personally I've never one that obsessed over A/V quality and I think most people in the world fall in the same boat as me. Do we notice when something is better quality if you look side by side? Sure. But if you do it in a vacuum I'd never notice the quality differences pointed out in the original pictures.

To me....HD is HD. 720p, 1080p.....really doesn't matter much to me as long as it isn't SD.

 

[Undecided]

I hate the banding in gradients.

 

[SchneiderMan]

I found out that you need to enable 1080p downloads in your iTunes store account for when renting and downloading movies that are available in 1080p. It's on 720p by default.

 

[Moonjumper]

What I wonder is why the jump from 480p to 720p is noticeable when the jump from 720p to 1080p isn't. Does the difference in pixel density really need to be at least 3 times?

In the UK we went from 576, so the gap wasn't so big to 720. I think both jumps are noticeable depending on the content. Displaying at the native resolution makes a difference, although scaling technologies have improved massively.

 

[Icaras]

I've already upgraded all my iCloud available movies on iTunes to 1080p and they look great for what the file sizes they're at. Just overall happy that we now have 1080p content at the store.

I used to be an extreme AV nitpicker for this stuff but I've recently really warmed up to iTunes over the last year. With iCloud, iPad 3, ATV3, and 1080p content, I'll take a digital only iTunes HD version over a physical blu-ray copy. Those 4 elements really sealed the deal for me. I like freeing up shelf space and keeping things minimal and neatly on a hard drive where it's out of sight, and with iCloud, being able to redownload many of my movies and pretty much all of my TV shows, so whenever Apple upgrades any of your content (adds "extras", adds Dolby Digital 5.1, closed captioning, subtitles, etc..), you can just redownload the higher quality version, not to mention having your content available anywhere and anytime you bring your iOS device as well.

There are other advantages to iTunes video content than just sheer picture and audio quality, but its nice that Apple is getting closer to blu-ray with the former.

 

[nsfw]

The general population likes Dancing with the Stars, Madonna and Adam Sandler movies. There is no accounting for taste. The general population likes Cheesecake factory and McDonalds. There is no account for taste. The general population likes True Religion jeans. There is no accounting for taste. The general population uses the Apple throw away earphones that come with ipods and iphones. The general population thinks 128k mp3 files are good enough.
Why would anyone think that people would care about heavily compressed 1080p files? They don't care about their heavily compressed 1080i/720p broadcast images from cable or satellite. You've compared OTA vs cable/sat? The difference is amazing. No one cares. Garbage in/Garbage out.

 

[tekno]

It's the contrast gradient artefacts that really annoy me. My 42" plasma is 10ft away so the 720/1080 difference is barely noticeable.

As long as there's a Blockbuster just a few minutes walk away (or even on my journey home from work), I'm afraid renting from iTunes just isn't worth it for me.

 

[Kissaragi]

Probably matches SKY HD then. Blu ray is just a little better than SKY. On my setup anyway.

 

[GREEN4U]

The general population likes Dancing with the Stars, Madonna and Adam Sandler movies. There is no accounting for taste. The general population likes Cheesecake factory and McDonalds. There is no account for taste. The general population likes True Religion jeans. There is no accounting for taste. The general population uses the Apple throw away earphones that come with ipods and iphones. The general population thinks 128k mp3 files are good enough.
Why would anyone think that people would care about heavily compressed 1080p files? They don't care about their heavily compressed 1080i/720p broadcast images from cable or satellite. You've compared OTA vs cable/sat? The difference is amazing. No one cares. Garbage in/Garbage out.

Actually I would argue that the general population now hates McDonalds or thinks its uncool to go there. Therefore, McDonalds is now awesome.

----------

OMG I want McDonalds soooo bad now. They put sugar in all their food so it makes it so tasty...

 

[dokujaryu]

Considering I gain 'get it right now' and lose 'annoying menus/trailers/FBI warnings' I consider this very slight loss of quality a very fair trade.


I tend to rent movies instead of owning anyway...but IF I ever buy, this seems like a fair trade-off.




The article full of screen shots seems to indicate that yes, they CAN be compared. Blu-Ray wins, sure. But the comparison is not ridiculous.

I consider myself a middle of the road guy with television and movie stuff. I have a good quality 720p plasma that I've had for about 6 years that does the job really well. I also have some good speakers hooked up to an old but ok stereo. So, all in all, a budget setup.

These formats do the job well on my common hardware setup and I consider the cost / convenience a plus. I generally get more enjoyment out of even the low quality movies from the iTunes store because the Apple TV is silent while my PS3 for bluray sounds like a 1980's hoover. Not really the format's fault, but I'm not buying a 'quiet' blu-ray player when I have a ps3 already.

 

[zorahk]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A406 Safari/7534.48.3)

No one with a half decent home theatre is going to buy movies off iTunes. Blu-ray is a far superior product.
Not having DTS-MA = no sale.

 

[ctdonath]

Why some of you want to abandon all of that puzzles me. You want to lose all the extras? ... Really?

<shrug> For most movies, no loss. Watched once, "right now" paramount, no interest in spending additional time on tangential material (got better things to do). Don't want to commit cubic yards to stuff I won't ever see again. Don't want to commit additional distribution costs to what won't improve the content (few romantic comedies would benefit from 30Mbps 1080p space-consuming formats; "watch X _now_" in streaming lossy 720p is sufficient).

Doesn't mean we won't go all-out on something worthwhile. Multi-disc accessory-laden editions of Blade Runner, Watchmen, Lord of the Rings, etc. are worth all the additional material and premium high-bitrate media. Those are fascinating with worthwhile extras, and satisfy a sense of owning something worth owning.

 

[jontech]

So when crap comes from Apple, it's good for the masses, but if comes from Microsoft or Adobe or anyone else, it's bad.

I'd say Apple's crap is on par with Adobe's and Microsoft's crap

 

[rlogan814]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

I just finished redownloading my my entire tv show collection (over 300 episodes) in 1080p and am loving it! A nice bonus is that if you select "prefer 1080p" from the download preferences you no longer get the stupid SD version with it automatically since it gives you the option on your idevice to download the SD file straight to it when you click on purchases in iTunes on your device! So the 1080p version is a cople hundred MB larger, not having to download the SD version actually saves you the disc space that was wasted before.

No cable or satellite service can offer 1080p on currently airing shows, but if I wait till the day after a show airs to to download I get it in 1080p with no commercials!

Finally, Apple just allowed everyone to update their previous purchases from 720p to 1080p for free, I'd bet that there will be the opportunity for that to happen again. Try doing that with a bluray if a new standard resolution is set. iTunes 1080p might not be as good as bluray 1080p now, but it can always be updated.

 

[Powerbooky]

I wouldn't be surprised if the iTunes 1080p content was encoded using a blu-ray source. If that's the case, the amount of compression artifacts will be a lot more than when using the original edit-master.

Besides... as a professional video-engineer I can tell that there are huge differences between software/hardware encoders. The QuickTime H.264 encoder isn't great. And most of all... the H.264 standard is an 8bit video standard. Which basically means that you always will see some stair-casing in the lower video-levels. A good encoder will obscure this with a little added noise, but it never will look as good as the 10bit original.

 

[darkplanets]

Considering what it is, iTunes did pretty well in my opinion. The quality loss wasn't that bad, surprisingly.

I realize no bandwidth will allow this (yet), but I'm still waiting on hi10p and/or totally uncompressed content.

Some millennium.

 

[Tarzanman]

The reason that a lot of you think its "no big deal" is probably because you aren't used to watching high resolution, high quality video.

People made the exact same arguments about HDTV/Blu-ray being "no big deal" over standard definition television or even DVD video.

No, the lower bit rate 1080 video isn't unwatchable by any means, but it won't touch blu ray. A ~90 minute movie at 1080p off of a blu ray disc that has been compressed is still upward of 7GB. (720p rips are typically 4-5GB).

Obviously, Apple balked at providing files that large, so compromises had to be made.

It will be nice to see what a jailbroken Ipad3 is capable of handling video-wise. There are a lot of modern desktop computers that still don't have enough graphic power to decode h.264 video at 1920x1080p without skipping horribly.

Time shall tell.

 

[jontech]

The reason that a lot of you think its "no big deal" is probably because you aren't used to watching high resolution, high quality video.

People made the exact same arguments about HDTV/Blu-ray being "no big deal" over standard definition television or even DVD video.

No, the lower bit rate 1080 video isn't unwatchable by any means, but it won't touch blu ray. A ~90 minute movie at 1080p off of a blu ray disc that has been compressed is still upward of 7GB. (720p rips are typically 4-5GB).

Obviously, Apple balked at providing files that large, so compromises had to be made.

It will be nice to see what a jailbroken Ipad3 is capable of handling video-wise. There are a lot of modern desktop computers that still don't have enough graphic power to decode h.264 video at 1920x1080p without skipping horribly.

Time shall tell.

Blue Ray is compressed though as well, most of my blue rays, with the exception of animation have some sort of artifacts or compression issues at one time or another. Blu Ray is just less compressed, but still compressed nonetheless.

Can anyone say lossless video? Mastered for iTunes! 250gb Files ftw!

 

[dashiel]

Perhaps I'm in the minority - but I appreciate good design from packaging to "clever" menus to the actual content. I would have thought many posters on here would appreciate good design. But maybe too many are too into immediate satisfaction.

I would agree if the menus were good design, in general though they’re not; design of course being more than a visual aesthetic. Even those that escape the generally awful nature of home media menu screens are tiresome after the first or second time trying to watch the movie.

Blu-ray/DVD menus remind me of the really bad days of Flash when egocentric designers would throw megabytes of techno music, useless intros and obscure/hard to use navigation metaphors at users who just wanted to get a companies email address. To be fair Blu-ray is less bad than DVD in that regard, but still gives far too much focus to features 80% of users don’t want.

 

[Small White Car]

Slight loss of quality?

Lol. Blu-ray disc holds up to 50gig of data. Most movies are in the 30-40gig range. You lose audio and video quality and it's not a slight loss.

This really sounds like you didn't look at all the samples.

Also, I love how we all went from owning DVDs to not being able to even stand something that's easily twice as good.

I demand 4 times as good or nothing at all!