Good News For All. If It's True.

This does make sense if Apple will start selling 720P videos. Clearly that's overkill for the iPod, so some sort of re-encoding will be necessary. The killer app would be DVD ripping to iTunes, but I don't see how they can pull that off, other than in some wink, wink, nudge, nudge alliance with MacTheRipper.

H.264 encoding for DVR purposes? For analog, sure, but won't the HD MPEG2 streams be severly degraded by re-encoding them?

I burned a DVD off Prince's haltime Superbowl show (1080i - MPEG2), using the EyeTV - Toast7 combo, and while the process was very user friendly the result (with video settings set to high quality) looked much, much worse than a good commercial DVD (lots of artifacts) while the 1080i original looks fantastic.

Will MPEG2 to h.264 transfers look better than MPEG2 to MPEG2?

This would be good news. I originally loved the idea of iTV but unless it has HD content it is a no go for me. I get more from my xbox 360 at least they sell shows and movies in HD. It pains me to say that being a big apple supporter, but they have really dropped the ball in the video area in my book. This would help reverse that.

If I understand correctly, such hardware playback/encoding support is already on the video chip, at least on the ATI chips. See this link to Avivo:

http://ati.amd.com/technology/avivo/technology.html

It may be as simple as enabling the technology in OSX.

We also need to remember that Cringely is the same guy who recently decided that because the appleTV had a hard drive, that he thought its presence indicted that Apple was seeding the boxes in stealth mode to set up P2P nodes. Then Apple would spring the network service side of the whole scenario after enough of them were deployed to be able to serve as seeds for a new HD content delivery system. Far-fetched to say the least. While I love the idea, I doubt that Apple will move in this direction.

Likewise, the notion that they will put a $50 H.264 decoder/encoder in EVERY Mac pushes the envelope of belief for today's Apple. There are existing technologies to enable hardware decoding/encoding in the current Mac C2D line that just need to be developed beyond proof of concept. Once again I think that while Cringely has a great idea, it is far from the realm of possibilities in Apple's plans. But I wouldn't mind being proven wrong on this one.

Jimmy: Which Macs currently have these Avivo chips -- some MacPros & MacBookPros?

Wildrock: Cringely writes lots of stuff which is pure guesswork, but in this case he is claiming an inside source. It may be a rumor, but supposedly it is more than just a guess. Cringely certainly knows enough "insiders" to have sources, but his columns are mostly filled with wild fancy and wishful thinking -- come on Mr. Stephens (Cringely's real name) where are my Apple branded HDTVs?

The Apple TV is clearly setup for HD 720p content.

The problem with technologies like ATI's Avivo and Nvidias PureVideo is that they are GPU specific. If Apple adds a dedicated chip for encode/decode in EVERY Mac this guarantees a base level of performance.

I could easily see them doing this as they have been talking about Top Secret featues in Leopard for a while. Now what type of Top Secret feature can Apple deliver that doesn't require Developer advanced notice? Well anything that deals with Quicktime.

Say that Apple has encourage Developers to write their apps against the new 64-bit QTkit frameworks. So Developers do this thinking that this is the new shiny API that they should be using. What they may not realize is that the core of this new API may very well tie into a DSP engine. Apple's worked hard to abstract the new QTkit from hardware dependencies thus once the API has been written against Apple could conceivably attach these calls to any piece of hardware they want to.

That would indeed be a killer feature. Video encoding is so dog slow and slow machines struggle to decode which wrecks the presentation of media.

A little digging around on AMD/ATI's web site seems to indicate that Avivo is supported on Radeon x1900, x1800, x1600 and X1300 series chips and that corresponding features of Nvidia chips are supported on the 7000 series that Apple uses.
However, as hmurchison points out in his knowledgeable post above, Apple may have something else up their sleeve.

I can see an H.264 decoder chip for the AppleTV, sure. (AppleInsider reported that it has a 1 GHz Pentium M processor - certainly not fast enough on its own to decode 720p H.264, so it's going to need some help.) But, to extend that to claiming that every Mac box will have one is silly. Even the lowest end mini is capable of decoding 1080p H.264 video without skipping a beat. Why stick a $50 chip in something that doesn't need it? Furthermore, to claim that there will an H.264 encoder goes well over the fine line between wishful thinking and fantasy. Apple will never allow us to encode video that they want us to buy from iTunes (see his DVR speculation). It would just be shooting themselves in the foot.

Cringely has a terrible record when it comes to speculation and insider information. I can believe the AppleTV will have a hardware decoder, but that's as far as I'm willing to go before seeing the pudding.

I always thought there might be a chance of this happening until Cringley posted it. Based on track record, I'd say that reduces the odds of it being true. I'm now very doubtful, where once hopeful...

Well, that's the whole point. He's talking about HARDWARE decoding. It would not rely on the power and speed of the CPU, thus allowing a "level video encoding/decoding playing field" from the slowest Mac all the way up to the fastest Mac.

Of course, we are talking about FUTURE models. And those future models wouldn't have a single core processor anyway. But the point is still valid.

Mark

I'm aware of Cringley's accuracy or lackthereof. However I do have to agree with his sentiments. There are a few arguments that make sense but all have their weak points.

Why don't you just use the GPU? - This solution sounds great. We've become accustomed to reading about how awesome some task are when processed through the GPU. The only problem I can readily see is this.

1. Cost- Apple does not want to add an expensive GPU to the Mac mini and Macbook when they will have GMA965 graphics to utilize.

2. Heat. The higher you go on your GPU speed the more cooling you need. I'm not sure Apple's going to want to design around adding beefier GPU. They've already downlocked the graphics speed in the Macbook.

A dedicated option is too costly/complex- Apple has now made the full software stack in 10.5 64-bit. This means they've gone through and cleaned out the muck. I think a side benefit is that they've been able to replace old plumbing with new shiny stuff.

We know that User Interface rendering is going to be threaded in Leopard. This means that Applications will seek to keep the GPU fed at all times. If Apple adds a media co-processor it only need be engaged for non UI benefits. Sure you can encode/decode h.264/AVC video right now but look at your CPU..it's pegged. Imagine being able to encode at the same rate with a co-processor that uses 2 watts of power? Imagine the hit on your CPU only being %10 of what it was before you had the co-processor.

Is there a need?

Look at all the apps that could immediately benefit from a dedicated media co-processor.

Ilife- iDVD, iMovie
Final Cut Pro- Compressor
iChat Theater
Front Row
the list goes on. Anything that has to do with video would benefit. Anything that doesn't deal with video would benefit from having more CPU time.

I'm going to see if I can find some likely candidates should Apple decide to do this. Quite honestly I don't think the chip would cost $50. If Apple was serious about delivering millions of Macs with these chips I think we'd be looking more at $25.

Incidently AMD is developing a platform for their CPUs that will encompass CPU/GPU and co-processors that can be added.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrenza Same concept but more ambitious design.

I'm not saying that Apple will do this but the possibility is there.

3Dlabs DMS-02 co-processor
http://www.3dlabs.com/content/mediaProcessor.asp