Jim Goldman of CNBC recently sat down with Steve Jobs to discuss the new and upcoming products Apple announced during the MacWorld Expo held earlier this week. Jobs was asked about the format war and if he thought Apple had usurped both Blu-ray and HD DVD with their addition of HD movie rentals to iTunes. His response was, "Clearly, Blu-ray won, but in the new world order of instant online movie rentals, in HD, no one will care about what format is where." We, of course, disagree with the "Mac Daddy" about the second part.
What he failed to mention about Apple's iTunes HD movies is that they use much lower bit-rates than Blu-ray and are only encoded in 720p, half the resolution of Blu-ray, which encodes all film content at 1080p (Full HD). The result is a picture which is only half as sharp, half as colorful, and half as beautiful as Blu-ray. Furthermore, only some of the iTunes HD movies have surround sound, and those that do only make use of the archaic Dolby Digital technology. Anyone who has listened to a PCM, Dolby TrueHD, or DTS-HD Master Audio track knows that there is simply nothing that can compare to a lossless/uncompressed audio track.
I hope someone sends him a copy of '
Ratatouille' on Blu-ray soon to show him what True HD really looks like and that not all HD is created equally.