blurry itunes visualizer
I just got a new Sony with the HDMI inputs. 1920x1080 with the HDMI<->DVI adapter
The iTunes visualizer looks crisp and beautiful when I run it in "windowed" mode, but when I use the full-screen mode, its all blurry and sloppy looking, as if it were scaling the image up from some other resolution - except that iTunes never changes video modes.
For some reason, the iTunes software must be using scaling in software when it runs in fullscreen mode. Probably on older, slower macintoshes this was necessary in order to keep a decent frame rate, but it stands to reason if it works in a very nearly fullscreen window now, it should do about the same in fullscreen.
The setting is available in iTunes "Preferences - Advanced" by checking or unchecking "Display visualizer full screen". There is also a setting for "Visualizer Size". "Large" is the least blurry, and "Small" makes really blocky graphics.
It looks like the iTunes visualizer software hasn't kept up with user-friendly support for modern display sizes or the relative need to engage in scaling in the first place: a 1.6GHz Intel Core Duo Mac Mini is hardly representative of the "high end" of macintosh performance these days, but it performs quite well when handling a pixel-count of about 1920x900, so 1920x1080 shouldn't be too hard to handle either.
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I'm also a little pissed off that when I wanted to view some 1080 HDTV trailers from the Apple website, my choices were either to hope that the video loaded as fast as it plays (not always the case, even with a Cable Modem, if I am using my connection for other things at the same time) or buy QuickTime Pro to "save" the file. Fortunately, I was able to simply do a "view source" on the Apple page, locate the QT file, then copy and paste in the URL, at which point I could save the file and view it with QuickTime without any choppiness.
(Nov 1, 2008) UPDATE: Apple seems to have fixed this problem at least a week or two ago! I hope they fix the equalizer problem just as quickly - people are already with hints for a manual fix, so adding a prefs button for "reset window positions and sizes to default" ought to be possible.
The iTunes visualizer looks crisp and beautiful when I run it in "windowed" mode, but when I use the full-screen mode, its all blurry and sloppy looking, as if it were scaling the image up from some other resolution - except that iTunes never changes video modes.
For some reason, the iTunes software must be using scaling in software when it runs in fullscreen mode. Probably on older, slower macintoshes this was necessary in order to keep a decent frame rate, but it stands to reason if it works in a very nearly fullscreen window now, it should do about the same in fullscreen.
The setting is available in iTunes "Preferences - Advanced" by checking or unchecking "Display visualizer full screen". There is also a setting for "Visualizer Size". "Large" is the least blurry, and "Small" makes really blocky graphics.
It looks like the iTunes visualizer software hasn't kept up with user-friendly support for modern display sizes or the relative need to engage in scaling in the first place: a 1.6GHz Intel Core Duo Mac Mini is hardly representative of the "high end" of macintosh performance these days, but it performs quite well when handling a pixel-count of about 1920x900, so 1920x1080 shouldn't be too hard to handle either.
--
I'm also a little pissed off that when I wanted to view some 1080 HDTV trailers from the Apple website, my choices were either to hope that the video loaded as fast as it plays (not always the case, even with a Cable Modem, if I am using my connection for other things at the same time) or buy QuickTime Pro to "save" the file. Fortunately, I was able to simply do a "view source" on the Apple page, locate the QT file, then copy and paste in the URL, at which point I could save the file and view it with QuickTime without any choppiness.
(Nov 1, 2008) UPDATE: Apple seems to have fixed this problem at least a week or two ago! I hope they fix the equalizer problem just as quickly - people are already with hints for a manual fix, so adding a prefs button for "reset window positions and sizes to default" ought to be possible.