marc (marcn) wrote, @ 2007-04-02 12:46:00

Is it really that great an 'attack'?
In response to The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007 wherein Cringley claims there's something clandestine, and mysterious about supporting hardware accellerated H.264/AVC:

Video cards have long offered HW decoding for video codecs (like MPEG, the successor to AVC), but I'm not sure this is such a 'special case' as it's being made out to be; both ATI and Nvidia have AVC encode/decode support in shipping cards.

IMHO this rumour sounds like a much simpler issue; Apple may upgrade to one of these video cards -- hardly surprising, given they're both existing suppliers -- and may naturally build upon those new capabilities.

Given that Apple has previously indicated support for Blu-Ray, and with AVC one of the supported codecs, it makes complete sense for them to support encoding, in just the same way that CoreAudio/Video/Animation (et al) were initially developed for their 'Pro apps', and then migrated to the OS for more general purpose use.

Such a move would have great implications for their 'i'/'Pro' video apps and of course the iTunes Store, but in general is also just another step (back) in the 'ASIC' trend to offload discrete functions to dedicated hardware.

OS X video playback does lag behind the best that Windows can offer (with third-party cards, codecs and drivers) -- it takes a G5 or better to handle HD -- so there's also the aspect of simply keeping up with expectations.

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