iTunes video review

Lost: from iTunes

Just out of curiosity, I bought an episode of Lost from the iTunes store. I’ve never actually seen the show, but I was real curious about the video file.

It’s a 210MB Mpeg4 movie file (.m4v). It’s 320 x 240. The video compression listed when played in QuickTime is “AVC0 Media, Millions”. The audio is listed as “AAC (protected), Stereo, 44.100 kHz” and it’s 24fps.

Even though the video is only 320×240, it actually scales pretty well. You can double it without any substantial quality loss. I went all the way up to full-screen (1280×1024), and although it was watch-able at that size, you did lose a lot of detail. I wouldn’t want to watch too many shows stretched that far. That being said, I think it’s still pretty impressive that the file can be stretched to quadruple its original size, and not have it totally breakdown.

The image above is a screenshot from the file when it was stretched to double its original size. Some of the artifacts in the image are from the jpg compression, not from the movie.

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 Apple

3 Comments to iTunes video review

  1. Thanks for this review. I was just dying to find out what the image was like.

    This is going to really be good. It sure beats files that are out of sync. I had always dispised Apple but now I have changed - I may even vote Democrat next, ummmm maybe not.

    Thanks

    2. Ted Sbardella on October 12th, 2005

  2. i’m buying episode 1 of desperate housewives since i just so happen to have the bit torrent version of it for comparison. i’ll be posting about it later today. it seems surprisingly fast to download.

    3. Melvin Rivera on October 13th, 2005

  3. A good start to legal downloads…but it’ll need to be better than this to beat the bit torrent versions. 320×240? TOO SMALL. So 16×9 tv shows, like Lost, are 4×3 centre-cut. Yuck. My biggest question is… can the public in overseas markets (where local tv stations have yet to broadcast the episodes) still download these shows from the iTunes store?

    4. Stephen R on October 14th, 2005

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The Author

Paul Burd is a multimedia designer, and amateur photographer, living in San Francisco. More...

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