Digital Home Thoughts: What's Apple's Big 'Transition' News?

"I reported more than a year ago and repeated in this year's predictions that Apple would be adding H.264 hardware support to its entire line of computers. The chip they are adding comes from NTT in Japan and was developed in cooperation with Japanese broadcaster NHK. The chips began sampling a year ago and should now be available in volume, though Apple may be paying as much as $50 each for early production...The NTT chip is not just an H.264 decoder, it encodes, too, which is what makes it so special. The last I heard NHK was claiming the chip could compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits normally required. If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they've already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they'll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second."

The quote above is from one of my favourite technology pundits, Robert X. Cringely, and his article on what he thinks is going to be coming from Apple. I think it makes a fair deal of sense. h.264 is a truly spectacular format for video, but it's also spectacularly taxing to encode and decode. The decoding side of it can be handled with enough CPU muscle, or any number of decent video cards.

Encoding is a whole different story. Even the most powerful CPU can be brought to its knees by h.264 encoding, and worse yet, most encoding applications currently on the market are particularly poor at using multiple cores on a CPU. Pinnacle Studio 12 for instance only uses, at best 15%, of my total CPU power when rendering h.264 video. That's on an Intel Quad Core CPU, so that's only 60% of one core. I'm waiting to hear back from Pinnacle on this issue, because that seems so pathetic I'm hoping it's a bug they'll be fixing.

The only way to get h.264 encoding done any faster is with dedicated hardware - like this ADS USB add-on. Problem is, products like that are limited in functionality and rarely tie directly into whatever video editing program you're using. I've been on the prowl for someone, anyone, to integrate h2.64 encoding at the motherboard or CPU level, and when I was in Austin talking to AMD I brought up the issue several times. The answer I got back was essentially "we're thinking about it for sometime in the future". I wouldn't be surprised if Apple gets there first, then a year later, the rest of the industry catches up once they realize how truly game-changing it is when playback and encoding of 1080p video is fast and easy.