Apple Adding H.264 Hardware Decoder Chip to Macs?

Robert Cringley claims that Apple is planning on incorporating dedicated H.264 decoding chips into future Mac hardware.

Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed. I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.

The article claims that incorporating a dedicated H.264 decoding chip will allow Apple to ensure the same base performance on every machine it sells. The $50 chip is said to also offer H.264 encoding to allow users to quickly encode high quality video clips for upload to the internet.

H.264 is a high quality video format which Apple uses to encode their video content on iTunes and the web. Apple has a FAQ on H.264 on their website.

Robert Cringley has been know for posting speculative predictions in the past, but specifically notes that this is from an outside source that he believes to be true.