I thought it would be a good idea to see how this new fangled iTunes video works, and how it compares in different sizes on screen.
As you may be aware, the video in the iTunes Video Store (iTVS?) is in 320×240 resolution, but it’s also encoded in high-quality, H.264 QuickTime format with mpeg-4 sound, so it should scale rather well… In theory… Let’s see.
I chose to download the 3rd episode of Lost and the part where Sawyer gets jumped on the beach (for it’s fast moving action) for this experiment, the file was 197.8mb and took about 3 minutes (sweet bandwidth), when it’s done you can go to the Video section in iTunes where it’s available to watch.
A nice little graphical interface, you can change it to be like the usual iTunes list but I like this, if only they displayed albums like this too… Anyways, onto the watching, the default view is in the Album Art section.
As you can see, this is pretty small, so if you double click the Album Art, a window will pop up.
In this original state it’s still very much watchable, but some compression is begining to show, you can enlarge this to any size you want, the default (at least on my PC) enlarged size is like this.
Slowly getting worse as it gets bigger, which is understandable… How does full screen look?
I’d go as far as saying it’s watchable, but dont be expecting to see little things that the producers of Lost hide in each episode, also I couldn’t pause on full screen so this was as close as I could get… Plus pausing it makes it look a lot worse than when it’s in motion.
Overall it’s a pretty nifty addition to the digital world, though I’m not so sure about paying $1.99 for something you can see for free already, maybe if the store expands to, say, Battlestar Galactica and things that I tend to miss on a regular basis then it would be worth while, I do like the fact they have season one of Lost for $35 as opposed to the $50 or so it would be if you bought each episode…
The next test is to see how it looks on the iPod screen… I’ll have to wait a while to see that though…