Silicon Alley Insider is offering "pure speculation" based on a tip that Apple's Fall future product transition is a video upgrade to Apple products that includes a QuickTime encoder/decoder on a chip.

As cool as this would be, I don't personally think it's a significant-enough development to warn investors about. Unless, of course, it's part and parcel of more substantial changes to Apple's product lines.

Having video playback functions handled by a separate microprocessor capable of dealing with the variety of media formats that QuickTime handles could yield performance increases for lower-end Macs (with less-powerful video cards) and battery life savings for handheld devices.

Also, depending on what codecs are included on-board, it could mean an end to countless hours converting video specifically for your iPhone, iPod touch, or Apple TV. Additionally, MacRumors' Arnold Kim notes that it could be of some use for encoding Blu-Ray video.

All I want is DivX AVI playback on my iPod touch. Pretty please?

It's nice for TUAW when Laurie is proven prescient, although it does tend to give her a slight air of haughty competence. Just five days ago she and Dave Zatz figured "a GUI wrapper can't be far behind" for the TiVoDecode tool... and now there are two. David Benesch's TiVoDecode Manager is a full-featured beastie -- it automates discovery, download and decoding of TiVo video to the desktop of your friendly neighborhood Macintosh. It's already at version 1.1, which bodes well for a rapid development schedule. Note also that for now you may need superplayer VLC to watch the MPEG-2 files that result.

There's also Nik Friedman's droplet TiVo Decoder, which wraps the same behind-the-scenes code in a basic drag-and-drop utility. It doesn't include a way to get the original files off your TiVo, but if you turn on Bonjour bookmarks in Safari you should see your DVR listed and you can grab the files via the browser.

Now, if I can get Laurie to post something predicting a financial windfall for me, or even "Rumor: Mike's post-holiday-party headache should be gone within a day or so," that'd be just great.

Update, Sunday evening: Reader Samuel McConnell has let us know about his Automator action, also called TiVo Decoder, which provides a wrapper for the utility -- you can check it out on his site.

[via engadget & PVRblog]