[pastusza]

I have always had this dream that I would cancel my Satellite TV, buy an AppleTV and pay for my shows a-la-carte. I figured it would cut down on channel surfing, and save me some money.

So, you can imagine my enthusiasm when hi-def TV shows became available on the iTunes Music Store. So I went and downloaded iTunes 8 today and pulled down the one free episode of Psych that was available in high def.

The file was 1.5 GB in size. It downloaded that, plus the smaller standard def 500 MB file. I assume the smaller file is need to syncing to iPods and iPhones.

I took my laptop and plugged it into the TV and went to check it out. The picture quality was pretty bad. The files seemed to have a lot of snow in them, and hi-def file stuttered slightly when I moved the cursor.

So, I went and got my hands on a SD divx and HD x.264 720p mkv file of the same show. The divx file was 349 MB and the mkv was 1.09 GB, both smaller than the iTunes download.

I played both of these files using vlc media player. Both files looked MUCH better than the ones downloaded from iTunes.

So, from my one show experience, I am quite unimpressed with the hi-def files.

My AppleTV dream is dashed for now...

I need to get some more shows from iTunes to get a better look at my options. It's possible that Psych may be bad, but other shows may be good. Most of the Universal/NBC content allows you to download one free hi-def episode. I'll queue some up overnight for download and see how they look.

[mduell]

Gizmodo has a pretty good article on this.
So how does the Matroska file you downloaded look better, despite using the same codec (H.264) with a lower bitrate? By using more of the optional features that H.264 supports; Apple's software (Quicktime, etc) only supports a limited subset of the H.264 feature set.

[pastusza]

The Apple downloaded file has a lot of snow when you look at it up close. It just looks fuzzy. The mkv file looks crisper and clearer. I even stepped away from the TV about 8 feet to check it out, and the mkv was clearer and brighter.

The article was very good. I understand what the article is talking about. To get true HD to your TV requires bandwidth and infrastructure we don't have in this country, sadly

In general, I notice that the HD British TV shows look WAY better than US HD TV shows. Same file size and length and the British shows look better. Compare a 1.46 GB mkv of Galactica and a 1.46 GB mkv of Bonekickers, and bonekicker wins hands down. Sadly, BBC America does not broadcast in HD, so I can't buy an HD show and compare...