Apple taking over 1080p television (News)

According to the technology equivalent of the Watchtower, MacDaily, Apple plans to add a H.264 chip under the bonnet of its hardware. The chip comes from NTT in Japan and was developed in cooperation with Japanese broadcaster NHK. It acts as a H.264 decoder and encoder. It can compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits.

If it works then it means that Apple will be able to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second.

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All I can say is: about time. The quality of the current movies for sale and rent on iTunes are a joke.

 

Hopefully this is true, I am hoping for Full 1080P HD from Apple iTunes soon.

Further cements my opinion that Apple won't be going Blu Ray .

 

Looks like apple won't go with the blu-ray soon........

but what's going on to people who don't have faster internet connections?

 

Only way this is going to work, is if isps start lifting their bandwidth caps.

Good luck renting few movies and staying under their limit. Also like bigspin said, it would work in japan and in some places in europe. But for north americans 1080p movies might take longer to download then they will to watch.

 

This rumour makes no sense. They need a special chip to decode h.264? All they need to do is put in a modern GPU. The Apple TV already uses a Go 7300. They just need to upgrade to a 8400M and they'll get h.264 decode for free without a separate chip. All discrete GPUs in current Apple computers already handle h.264 decode and the Intel GMA X4500 will do it too.

And h.264 encode? Again a GPU can do that too. nVidia is developing the BadaBOOM software which encodes h.264 on GPUs. I believe ATI 48xx can encode h.264 too in partnership with Cyberlink's PowerProducer. This is all part of GPGPU, and when OpenCL is finished, I don't doubt that GPU accelerated encoding will be integrated in Quicktime and Core Video.

 

i think the point is for the macbook and macbook air... that still use integrated graphics. an h.264 chip is cheaper, smaller, takes less power and produces less heat compared to a full blown gpu.

but yeah, i kinda missed the point here. all the modern mac's except the macbook and macbook air can handle h.264 encode and decode.

 

The MacDailyNews article said that such a h.264 chip will cost Apple as much as $50 per chip. If I'm not mistaken Intel's IGP chipsets typically sell in the low-$40 range. So a GMA X4500 in the GM45 chipset will already do h.264 encode at no extra cost. You can now get a retail 8400 GS in the $30 range. Granted mobile GPUs are more expensive, but it's almost certain that a 8400M GS will cost less than the $50 required for the h.264 chip yet do more.