Hardware video encoders tipped for Macs

Stephen Withers
Friday, 09 March 2007 13:11

Your IT - Home IT

Could Apple be planning to build video codec chips into future computers?

That's the rumour picked up by well-known columnist Robert X Cringely, and it makes a lot of sense to me.

He's talking about H.264, as used by iTunes and the iChat video conferencing software, along with anything else that cares to exploit QuickTime to handle video.

Cringely reckons Apple has picked a chip that does H.264 encoding as well as decoding. Not only would that be great for videoconferencing and playing back videos purchased from the iTunes Store, it also means Macs equipped with TV tuners could save nice small files in real time.

Recording digital TV streams is easy - the problem is that the files are so big. Being able to record directly to H.264 would give much smaller files at practically the same quality, and this would be a real boost for users of Elgato's EyeTV software, which drives most of the tuners sold to Mac owners.

Furthermore, it wouldn't tie up the Mac's CPU in the process. So even a low-end machine could be used for compute-intensive tasks while encoding is happening.

I can't help feeling that if this rumour turns out to be accurate, Apple would most likely also offer a TV tuner, if only as a BTO option. But wouldn't that risk its relationships with the program makers who currently sell episodes through the iTunes Store? And would it squeeze Elgato out of the picture by delivering its own software (presumably an extension to iTunes)?

Now just a minute... didn't former Elgato CEO Freddie Geier join Apple about 18 months ago as managing director of Apple Germany? Is that coincidental?