How good is the iTMS video encoding? Let’s take a look… at Daniel Spisak on Technology

With Apple’s announcement of its deal with Disney/ABC to sell episodes of Lost and a few other shows on Apple’s iTunes Music Store I decided to spend a $1.99 of the 3 bucks and change that I had in my iTMS acount to check out the quality of the H.264 video encoding. Well after downloading Episode 3 of Lost from Season 2 I can say that the quality of the video is excellent.

Lets touch on file sizes here for a moment. For this episode of Lost which comes in at 43:29 in length the video is 197.8MB. It’s encoded in MPEG-4 video codec according to what Quicktime 7 is telling me, with the audio in AAC protected format using PlayFair 2.0 DRM. The video is encoded at 320×240 resolution at a bit-rate of 628kbit/sec. Below are some high quality JPEG screen captures from the video playing on my Mac:

Lost, Season 2, Episode 3, Grab 1

Lost, Season 2, Episode 3, Grab 2

Lost, Season 2, Episode 3, Grab 3

Lost, Season 2, Episode 3, Grab 4

Lost, Season 2, Episode 3, Grab 5

About the Author

Daniel Spisak was born from the fiery depths of fusion and now roams the pale blue dot known as Earth. I obtained my bachelors degree in Computer Science from UC Irvine at the end of 2007.

I am also involved in technology & security consulting firms as well as being a freelance technology writer. I also contribute to Jerry Pournelle's website and Chaos Manor Reviews. Additionally I am also a freelance photographer as well and you can find my photos either on my own personal gallery or up at my Flickr account or on Zivity.

This blog is one of the main locations where I do my writing, which is then automatically sent to my LiveJournal, VOX, and MySpace accounts. I can also be found on a variety of social networking and microblogging sites like Pownce, Twitter, Brightkite, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

If your viewing this site with Internet Explorer it may not look correct because IE is horrible about following W3C web standards properly or consistently. I suggest you try browsing the Internet with Firefox. It is much better and not as vulnerable to security flaws as IE can be.