I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007 | PBS
Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed. I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.
So what’s in it for Apple? Potentially a lot, because the chip Apple has chosen doesn’t cost $7, it costs more like $50, and it doesn’t just do hardware H.264 decoding, it does hardware H.264 ENCODING, too.
In a YouTube world, the new Macs will be a boon to user-produced video, which will, in turn, promote the H.264 standard. By being able to encode in real time, the new Macs will have that American Idol clip up and running faster than could be done on almost any other machine. Add in Slingbox-like capability to throw your home cable signal around the world and it gets even better. Add faster video performance to the already best-of-league iChat audio/video chat client, and every new Mac becomes a webcam or a video phone.
I hope this is true. I don’t have experience with this type of technology, but it seems like a simple and cool idea. It’s as simple as the idea of using flash memory so that you never have to hibernate or power down.
Please note that some comments were of contrary opinion, see:
The PowerBook G3 (Lombard) models from 1999 offered optional an DVD drive with hardware decoding. I believe there was a special version of the Mac OS 9 DVD player which used the hardware decoder as opposed to software decoding. When Mac OS X shipped the OS X DVD Player only used software decoding, however those 400MHz PowerBook models had no problem with the software and the MPEG-2 decoding hardware went unused. There was a class action lawsuit related to older Macs which supported DVD playing in OS 9 but not OS X. [snip]
So you’re telling us that after all that trouble Apple went through with the original DVD decoding hardware, they’re going to back to it? [snip]
and:
[T]here has been hardware decoding on graphics cards for years. I think Cringely may have heard something coming down the line and misinterpretted it.
Now, if Apple is going to make sure that the onboard decoding is good enough for full res HD content across the entire product line, AND going to make sure the drivers are all in line and that QuickTime calls on it to use that instead of CPU, THAT is news. But onboard hardware decoding isn’t.
And as the other poster said, hardware acceleration of encoding at the consumer level is poor quality. Realtime, yes, and that’s signficant, but poor quality.
Anyhow, hardware decoding and encoding does sound like a gateway to something cool. But maybe I’m just an excited layman getting caught up in yet another Cringely “prediction”. Maybe.
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