Phone
Phone Link pictures are compressed so although it works it's not ideal for getting original pictures from the phone
Compressed! You left out decompressed – a very critical part of the process.
Of course, Phone Link uses the CODEC process - coder/decoder. I would also be shocked if it didn’t! In this case, it is the standard Intel Bluetooth CODEC.
There is nothing wrong with using compression. In fact, it is almost ALWAYS required when moving media files. As a retired broadcast engineer & still a current member of SMPTE I am intimately familiar with the coder/decoder process. When done properly the CODEC process produces media with no
perceived loss of quality (although the size of the file is greatly reduced in video files, jpegs, etc, not so much). It is simply a process to move large amounts of data more efficiently.
You will be hard-pressed to view or hear anything that hasn’t gone through the CODEC process on your computer – like sending & receiving to & from the cloud. Or the programs you watch on your TV (You should see the CODEC that I installed on my HDTV 50 Watt Transmitter, now many years ago). Or the videos you watch with Media Player or VLC. They ALL use CODECS.
Picture quality is not compromised on my PC using Phone Link. I automatically copy (when WiFi is available) my Android phone Gallery to OneDrive & Amazon Photos as I have both apps on my phone. I can see no difference between the same photo when retrieved from the cloud or retrieved using the Phone Link app.
Just as a further test I hooked up a USB cable to my phone & transferred a photo to my PC. Can’t see any difference.
Apple has an interesting take on the audio CODECS for airpods.
"Apple has developed its own lossless audio compression technology called Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC). In addition to AAC, the entire Apple Music catalog is now also encoded using ALAC in resolutions ranging from 16-bit/44.1 kHz (CD Quality) up to 24-bit/192 kHz.
While the difference between AAC and lossless audio is
virtually indistinguishable, we’re offering Apple Music subscribers the option to access music in lossless audio compression."
About lossless audio in Apple Music
As a former broadcast engineer, I prefer to do things wirelessly! PFM! as we say in the biz. P is for Pure. M is for Magic. F is for.....
To each his/her own!
Cheers!
