Apple Adding H.264 Hardware Decoder Chip to Macs?

Not sure where the best place to have this discussion is, but Cringley is at it again, this time speculating (well, hinting that he knows) that Apple will be putting h.264 encoding/decoding hardware in all Macs as soon as this year.

Here's the article:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070308_001806.html

I don't really see much point in the mac mini for example...

Could be help for apple tv users needing to convert a butload of media.

The new ATi chips have H.264 decode/encode built in (AVIVO). All this means is that all the Mac's will be getting ATi chips (or the nVidia equivalent). There won't be a dedicated chip other than that.

I don't get what he thinks the big hoopla is about. Anyone with half a brain could have predicted this. (Except maybe in the Mini or Macbook which don't have ATi chips but may in the future have them)

I don't really see much point in the mac mini for example...

Um. That's exactly the point... even the slower/less expensive machines would have the same baseline for video performance as the most expensive machines. The benefits outside of video production is in faster than realtime transferring of video to iPods/iTV/websharing.

Apple could sell HD movies and iTunes could transcode that video to an iPod sized file, etc etc. Assuming it did MPEG2 as well as h264 (not unlikely if it happened) it would benefit iDVD which is something that people are going to be using more and more for home movies, photo slideshows, amateur productions, etc etc.

Anyways, if they do this, I expect to see it more as a Core Video like implementation where supported GPUs take over encoding/decoding work which would give a baseline level of support to all Macs but would give people incentive to upgrade to more expensive machines/GPUs.

Um. That's exactly the point... even the slower/less expensive machines would have the same baseline for video performance as the most expensive machines. The benefits outside of video production is in faster than realtime transferring of video to iPods/iTV/websharing.

If it is a dedicated chip then they will all be as fast, but if like i'm thinking it will just be an ATi graphics chip doing the encode then the faster macs (with faster graphics) will still have an edge speedwise.

However, if true and there will be a dedicated chip then that would add credence to the rumor that they will be announcing special hardware accelerators for the Mac Pro.

I don't get what he thinks the big hoopla is about. Anyone with half a brain could have predicted this. (Except maybe in the Mini or Macbook which don't have ATi chips but may in the future have them)

I don't see any big hoopla, but riddle me this: if this is such an obvious development, then why hasn't anyone done it yet?

This would be a pretty significant update to owners who currently have 24" iMac's and use them as there media center.

An update like this would really make me consider selling my 24" iMac.

Power supply temperature of 186 degree's ferhanheit while converting 720p 59.7fps recording to be able to play on a dvd player and sustaining those high temps for about an hour trying to do the encoding and then burn it. All the while using 98% of the cpu power

Yay.

Then maybe the "vencoder" process won't use 40% of my CPU when I'm in a video iChat. :)

I don't see any big hoopla, but riddle me this: if this is such an obvious development, then why hasn't anyone done it yet?

I don't think the X1600 comes with Avivo but the newer chips from ATi do (the X1650 or something). More than likely Apple is going to upgrade all it's systems with these new Avivo chips.

If you have a PC with an AVIVO enabled ATi card you can download a special decoder from ATi.

(Looking at it i'm not sure if it can do hardware encode of H.264 at the moment but with the programmable pipeline i'd say it is possible to code this in in the future.