I have 100 movies in iTunes, I always watched the movies on my laptop. Then I purchased a home theater system where the movies do not look so good. It's all because of compression. Both audio and picture quality is negatively affected by compression because of the need of smaller download sizes. Do you think as time goes on and bandwidth becomes faster, iTunes will offer versions of uncompressed movies?
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion
We have absolutely no idea what Apple will do, nor are we allowed to speculate on the forums.
Unless you have a video camera that produces raw footage, all video is compressed. Of course you can compress to different formats and your issue is the format you are viewing wasn't designed to be blown up to the degree you are doing. It was only a few years ago Apple went from only distributing SD video to HD.
Another limitation is the original video. If a show isn't shot with HD then nothing can be done to make it sharper.
Blu ray movies are about 40 to 50 gbs, itunes are about 4 to 8. In order to decrease the download time, itunes has to compress these movies thus lowering the quality of the audio and picture. My question is...Will iTunes ever offer versions of movies that are identical to blu ray?
Bluray also uses compression but to a larger format. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Codecs
And the answer is, we don't know. Apple keeps developments pretty closely guarded until they are ready to be released. Until then anything else is speculation and speculation is prohibited in the Terms of use of the ASC site. Frankly, Apple may not even know. Ultimately what is distributed is up to the media owners.
I know you don't know, but do you think it is possible for apple to do something like that. Is it in their nature. Basically what I am trying to ask, is do YOU think it's whithin the realm of possibility for Apple to increase the quality of their movies? In your opinion, IS IT A POSSIBILITY?
I do not think we will see it until the next video codec standard comes in.
For a 1080p movie, iTunes currently uses h.264 at around 4-8Mbps, which gives pretty good quality for the size, Blu-Rays usually use h.264 as well, but at around 30-50Mbps.
h.265, which is still in developement I believe, can achieve nearly the same quality at half the bit rate, and therefore nearly half the file size. It can also support 2K, 4K and even 8K resolutions.
So I think (also not for quite a while yet) that the 720p and 1080p files will either get smaller, or, stay around the same size with an increase in percieved quality.
I think eventually 2K and 4K files will be available to download, but right now, they are just too big to transfer and manage, also not many devices can actually play those resolutions back yet. Until the ability to play them is there, and have them at a reasonable file size (apparently h.265 will be able to get good looking 4K around 7-12Mbps) I just can't see it yet.
Long story short, yes, but not for a while. The h.265 standard needs to be finished, get hardware decoding into products (this is key, otherwise battery life will be hilariously short), so a few years yet.
One more question, when, if at all, the higher quality (larger 2k 4k) files do come out...Do you think they will be an update to already purchased 1080p movies, or will they need to be purchased again?
I think you would need to purchase again, just like DVD > Blu Ray.
Apple did this with SD > HD films, they charge a different price for each, purchasing in SD will not get you the HD version. I wouldn't be surprised if they ditch SD for the most part and just do something like HD or 4K.
Thanks, that just ***** that i'm stuck with that crappy qualtiy with no hope that it will get any better!
Will iTunes ever offer uncompressed movies?
