Replace your 720p HD Movies with 1080p?

Doesn't work for me. I have reset all my prefs to download and play 1080p. But when I trash my old version of Wall E and then go to redownload through my "Purchases" section, it redownloads the 720p version. I know this because under the movie section it gives me the file sizes for both 720 and 1080.

It also states that Wall E downloads in 1080p.

But when I download it, it downloads the smaller 720p file size and the aspect ratio is 853x354.

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to get the larger version on my iMac.

mactechconsulting wrote:

If you erase your 720p issue, when you re dowload the same item, I Believe you would now get the 1080p copy!!!! They are nearly the same size as Apple is using a New compression format that magically has a better picture with no appreciable size increase!

What's the new compression format - sounds iffy?

This was always the danger that they offered 1080p without an adequate bitrate.

Not that I was doubting there is a new compression format (or perhaps some advanced h264 options not available on lower powered ATV2 hardware - a bit like CABAC/CAVLC on the ATV1 where CABAC encodes could tax the processor despite being more efficient).

The iffy comment simply relates to the fact that I can't see unless there's a truly revolutionary algorithm that we can roughly double the (in terms of number of pixels) output resolution from 720p to 1080p, and maintain the same compression quality despite higher resolution for the same bitrate.

AC

853x354 is Standard def. 720P is 1280x720 and 1080P is 1920x1080. The last number (Hiegt) of the pixels is how you determine the reolution. This is with a 16:9 Aspect ratio. Movies often use a wider aspect ratio then TV shows so the hiegth will be lower but the width will remain the same. A common 720P movie ratio is 1280x533. In your case it looks like the movie is 480P.

Alley_Cat wrote:

mactechconsulting wrote:

If you erase your 720p issue, when you re dowload the same item, I Believe you would now get the 1080p copy!!!! They are nearly the same size as Apple is using a New compression format that magically has a better picture with no appreciable size increase!

What's the new compression format - sounds iffy?

This was always the danger that they offered 1080p without an adequate bitrate.

Ars did a good explanation of this:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/03/new-itunes-1080p-looks-good-through-be tter-h264-compression.ars

Basically it uses better compression that wasn't supported in previous hardware.

Thanks Larry.

There are a variety of flavours of h264 compresion/profiles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

As I was suggesting earlier more powerful processor capability allows more advanced variants or encoding options to be used (these are generally more processor intensive to decode hence the need for more power irrespective of complexity of encoding).

AC

Will this work for TV shows as well??

Yes it does.

G[H]etto|Dalai|Lama wrote:

Will this work for TV shows as well??

Looks like it. I have 720p/SD copies of an episode of BBC's Sherlock. Checking purchased having changed download prefs to 1080p there is a download from the cloud icon, whereas things without 1080p available in my library just have downloaded.

AC

I have actually downloaded the 1080p version of Sherlock which is how I know it works.

The files are only slightly larger than the 720p ones, which is in line with reports on here that they are fairly low bitrate. I can however also confirm that the ATV2 plays them fine.

OK so what we need now is to A/B them - an AppleTV2 and an AppleTV3 on separate HDMI inputs playing the same thing so we can switch back and forth.