AlleyInsider: QuickTime on a chip?

Love the illustration!

I see Apple doing this-- including fast h264 encode/decode hardware in every Apple device capable of creating or displaying video. This includes computers, AppleTV and mobile devices, such as the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Why?

It establishes a baseline (or threshold) that means all these devices are capable of high-quality, efficient, real-time AV.

Apple has a history of doing this: the built-in floppy in the first Mac, built in CD/DVD in NeXT and later Macs, FireWire...

With the growth of social networking, collaboration, etc. the need to share AV content is exploding.

Soon, Content will not only be King... Content will be Everything!

Great illustration!!!!

Elgato turbo.264 x 10 FTW!

Elgato Turbo.264 x 10 FTW!

Really nice the illustration of this article. It looks pretty realistic the chip. ;-)

Maybe this is why they bought that microchip manufacturer. Maybe Apple has a EEE PC clone on the way, but with more of their personal style. It'd be like a hybrid of a low-end MacBook and a high end iPhone.

Since I'm speculating more here, I could see the chip being used to enable the level of video playback most Apple users are accustomed to, and perhaps also enabling video encoding so the computer could be used for video chat on 3G networks or WiFi. It would support simplified tethering with the iPhone (If they could get AT&T to get behind that). It would also have a multitouch screen with very sharp resolution to compensate for its size and support for existing iTouch and iPhone apps. It would also have a full keyboard, but no trackpad to keep room for the keyboard, partly to encourage people to embrace multitouch in an OSX setting. Of course, it would have at least one USB 2.0 port for mice, an external optical drive, etc. Use of the Intel Atom or perhaps the next version of it, plotted to integrate several motherboard components and video, would be a no-brainer. I'd guess an MSRP starting at $499 for one with low disc space and otherwise lacking features, and $799 for a really decked out one.

Other features I'd guess: OLED external display. Kept invisible most of the time, but will appear for Growl-style notices, like someone IMing you, email, or iCal alerts. Simple things the system could take note of before going to sleep or which could be pushed over the internet to the laptop. It could also encourage people to video things with the integrated camera other than themselves, perhaps by allowing the camera to face the exterior of the computer, rather than towards the user. As to how they'd manage that while keeping it aesthetic, I'm not sure. The basic philosophy would be a computer small enough, light enough, and cheap enough that people would like to take it along and use it for most of their life. The MacBook Pro is great (I'm using one right now), but it's a pain worrying about it getting stolen, and it's light for what it is, but I only use a bit of its power when I'm out and about. The MacBook Air is way too expensive, and EEE is showing there is definitely a niche Apple could fill.

H264 PDQ?
TUAW R0X?

LOL, somebody's been spoofed!

Besides, how would a decoder in an 8-pin package work? How is it supposed to get the data, from a serial RAM? And where are the outputs? This is ridiculous.

The most convincing arguments I've read about this stem around Blu-ray playback on the Mac (see the macrumors thread on this). By including a chip to decode on the board, Apple can neatly step around all the DRM restrictions movie studios want and not get OS X itself all hung up around it. Plus, when it's not being used, it can work as a co-processor for certain tasks if correctly applied.

As for DivX—or more likely people are using the "open" and better quality xvid codec used in perian which can decode DivX— can you get out of 2000 already? It's only really useful if you have an old library of stuff encoded with it or you actively pirate movies/shows, neither of which Apple cares about.

There's really no reason for Apple to "license" DivX when they have a superior format anyway, including their own "clean" and licensed mpeg-4. It's also murky territory to include competing technology with your own product, especially one that started its life as a hacked Microsoft version of MPEG-4 part 3.

Maybe they think they need this hardware encoder to get video recording on the iPhone.

[)amien