Itunes video downloads good quality? commercials??

[janeydoll]

does anyone know what kind of quality itunes video downloads are? I want to buy the season pass of big brother all stars but i need to make a back up so i can watch them on tv.

I need to know if they are great quality and if they have commercials?


thanks so much

[janeydoll]

does anyone know if they are good quality? do they have commercials or ads and if so please explain where they are, like beginning or middle or end or throughout?

thanks

[mpiper]

I have purchased two episodes. One Battlestar Galactica and the Aquaman Pilot (not picked up, but a potential spin-off of Smallville)

Neither had comercials. the quality was good, but it is natively formatted for the ipod, i.e. 320X240 resolution. It does resize nicely, but is NOT the same as DVD quality. I would compare it to original store-bought vhs movies (not home recordings)

Hope that helps.

[lordsmurf]

The quality is shit, to be quite blunt about it.

The QT H264 codec is terrible, and even on a 3Ghz system with an average video card will have jerks in the video. I don't know if it looks better on a Mac, or how it would look on a super-power PC system with dual 3Ghz CPUs and 256MB video cards. It should be fine on an iPod.

I bought 1 episode of a show last year, and I was pretty pissed off at how bad it looked.

The resolution is VCD-like, as mentioned.

I get a headache trying to watch it, and I feel pretty screwed over for paying $3 for something that dismal.

Probably would not have been so bad, had the DRM not prevented me from converting it to something a bit more stable (XVID, MPEG1, anything).

[ebenton]

I don't have an iPod, but I have a Pocket PC phone, on which I can watch WMV files that have been converted to view on the 320 X 240 screen. They look OK on the phone screen, but they look like crap on my PC. You can't really see the defects on the small screen, so it looks OK.

[Ai Haibara]

Of course, your own opinion of the quality may be different. I've seen people quite happy with 320x240 videos. My sister, who has a video iPod, runs the videos at full-screen on her PC's monitor (hmm... I never did ask her what screen resolution she's running at, but I know it's at least 1024x768) and she says she has no problems with any of it.

There's one other thing I should note here, though:

does anyone know what kind of quality itunes video downloads are? I want to buy the season pass of big brother all stars but i need to make a back up so i can watch them on tv.

iTunes videos have DRM, so you can't just back them up and convert them to a different format. If you have a video iPod, you can always enable the TV mode on it, connect it to a TV (through a special A/V cable), and watch the videos that way.

[jonas more]

Some of the TV shows I have purchased from iTunes look like total crap (very VERY choppy) while others are really pretty good.

The pilot episode of Blade: The Series looked horrible while the entire Night Stalker series is very good in my opinion.

As stated before, you can't convert iTunes video because it is DRM protected...

...but you can use screen capture software and record the video as it plays in iTunes.

I have made DVDs, VCDs, and SVCDs from recordings of DRM protected video in the past and I have been very pleased with the results.

Replay Screencast from Applian Technologies is my favorite http://www.applian.com/replay-screencast/index.php

Or if you want to use freeware you may want to try ZD Soft Screen Recorder http://www.zdsoft.com/screen-recorder/

Anthony