iTunes video quality drop?

[Naiera]

I noticed during last week’s episode of The Fosters that the video quality seems to have gone south. It’s the same thing this week. I also noticed macroblocking at one point during The Flash last week. Of course, that’s a rather “high speed” show, but I’ve never noticed it being that obvious before.

Has anyone else noticed something like this? Are the files still the same size? Or is someone mucking things up with the encodes?

[PCFan]

Last week I noticed a similar issue when streaming How I Met Your Mother through the iTunes TV Shows app on my Apple TV 4k. It was so blurry that it looked like a 480p stream when I started streaming an episode. I waited about 20 seconds, but the image would not sharpen up. I exited the stream and waited a few seconds then restarted the episode and it then streamed fine. A few days later I noticed that the Quick Start setting has no effect for TV shows in iTunes anymore and streams an episode as if Quick Start is disabled when I had Quick Start enabled as I seen the progress bar fill up quickly to the very end while I was streaming an episode.

[Star Lord]

I feel like the quality is dropping a lot. Lot of scenes in BR2049 looked blurry. There's no depth at all. The bit rate is messed up too. I guess they had to do that for maintaining a lower file size. I had to order the BluRay.

[Steedeel]

Is this actual instant streaming like Netflix or does Apple still buffer for a while before playback starts? I haven’t used mine for months as movie night has to be Blu-ray quality for me. ITunes was always just for the odd rental.

[Krizzle1]

Hmm, I played a movie/show a few weeks ago on my ATV and everything looked fine. I dont think Apple changes the quality on-the-fly, like if its set to 1080p, it'll buffer till that 1080p stream is ready and not bump it down to 480p to have seamless video playback (like Netflix)

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by Krizzle1

Hmm, I played a movie/show a few weeks ago on my ATV and everything looked fine. I dont think Apple changes the quality on-the-fly, like if its set to 1080p, it'll buffer till that 1080p stream is ready and not bump it down to 480p to have seamless video playback (like Netflix)

I thought maybe they changed it after the TV app came out?

[ManOfTheForest]

I have had no problems in playback on iTunes but my rentals have disappeared a few times over the last couple of months. They usually always come back for a minute or two but yesterday I had to do a restart after ten minutes.

[Naiera]

Even though it's essentially a download where you have no control over the file, there's still the possibility that the video quality has somehow dropped. The files could be smaller, or someone, somewhere along the way, messed up somehow.

[ManOfTheForest]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Even though it's essentially a download where you have no control over the file, there's still the possibility that the video quality has somehow dropped. The files could be smaller, or someone, somewhere along the way, messed up somehow.

Have you contacted the distributor or iTunes support ?

I don't much care for the iTunes department but their attitude seems different whenever I use my UK or US ID than when I contact regarding an issue with my Irish account.

The distributor might be faster in getting it sorted though.

[Star Lord]

Downloads from Netflix having around the same size as iTunes seem to look much better. Maybe some problem with the iTunes video encoding or codec?

[Fiffy]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Even though it's essentially a download where you have no control over the file, there's still the possibility that the video quality has somehow dropped. The files could be smaller, or someone, somewhere along the way, messed up somehow.

Have you tried actually downloading an episode to your computer and see if that file has the same quality issue you see when streaming? Also, do you have an ATV4K with Quick Start enabled?

In my experience iTunes content usually gets better over time rather than worse (since the files are re-encoded from time to time, which you can see from the MPEG-4 metadata of downloaded iTunes files).