Of Mystery and iTunes

[varjohaltia]

I've been without TV for a pretty long time now, but during my trip in Vegas I actually ended up watching a few episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. One of these episodes featured a character named Nicole Wallace. Once I got back home, suffering from my sore throat and consequently having a few nights to myself, I went to see if any CI episodes were available on iTunes, and indeed there were. Not only that, but there were two episodes featuring the very same character! How intriguing!

By now you may have checked the Wikipedia entry -- if not, do it now, so I can skip my explanation ;-)

No, this is more about why I like LO:CI. It reminds me of Der Alte, Inspector Morse, Derrick, and all the other policy procedural dramas / mysteries of the European flavor, where unlikely intelligent and well-read detectives catch unlikely intelligent and well-read criminals. Mmmm.

The only complaint I have is that iTunes picture quality isn't that stellar, and the player has a really, really horrible blanking issue; this is something no video player since the mid 90's should exhibit. Anyone else have the problem, or a solution for it? It appears as if the current and previous frame have a sharp boundary somewhere in the middle of the frame. For example, if someone moves from left to right, the top half of them is a bit further to the right than the bottom half?

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

We all love Nicole. :D

Did you read about how the network had people vote on whether she would die permanently or not?

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

Nope! Wow!

[cnovio.livejournal.com]

Gee, could it just be that iTunes sucks? ;)

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

Could be!

[cnovio.livejournal.com]

Hooray! I'm possibly right about something!

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking something similar to that about CI -- it's really rather different from the other L&O shows in that it's much more of the classic Sherlock Holmes detective show in approach. (I rather facetiously described the main character the other day as "Like Columbo, but a dick." He's an interesting character, though.)

As for iTunes, no, I really haven't had that problem. For what it's worth, there is no "iTunes player"; it's QuickTime. If the QuickTime player sucks on your machine, iTunes video will suck on your machine. On the Intel iBook that my budget is now regretting I bought, thanks to losing my job a month later, it seems to play quite nicely.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Look into Faceless Killers.

It's translated, and very gloomily Scandinavian. I thought of you.

[drakemobius.livejournal.com]

You know, I read this entry before, but totally missed your comment on video quality.
It is probably an issue they are trying to work out -- all the video they are transcoding for this service is, of course, interlaced video; an issue can happen with some refresh rates and interlaced video similar to what you describe. It pertains to the time it takes to completely display the whole image from frame to frame, if I remember correctly. I'm not very high up in the video-geekery hierarchy, I'm afraid.

Long story short, it's not really the fault of Itunes or quicktime, so much as an issue with the people encoding video to it.

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

I'm actually quite sure that it is an issue of synchronizing the double-buffering to screen refresh -- or something that appears the same -- and there really is no excuse whatsoever for not getting it right. It's actually interesting how difficult it is to convey what is happening, short of showing people. I can't take a screen shot with it, I can't really take a video of it... I can only try to describe it. Apparently our communication is still somewhat limited, despite all our technology.)
I haven't seen much deinterlacing issues with iTunes -- which is good, because I have seen other videos where it IS and issue, and it's really aggravating!