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121 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+75h.264 is great. for those that don't know what it is, for a bit more cpu time, you get better compression than divx with better image quality.
- NSResponder, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21It isn't news, it's a rumor. It Apple ever makes such an announcement, then it would be news.
This is just wishful thinking on cringely's part.
-jcr - EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -3/+24Um it ENcodes h.26x too. That's huge! Huge I tell you.
- Kale, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23$50 sound expensive for 264 hardware. I was going to try to find out how expensive it would be to do it on a FPGA, but opencores.com doesn't have any H264 algorithms listed.
This could really cut down on battery usage. There are MPEG-2 decoders out there that have a clock speed of 10 MHz (recalling from memory) that generate very litle heat (the same chips that are in the portable DVD players). Heck, the iPod already has an MPEG2/H264 decoding chip on board.
My MBP gets really warm when playing video. It could stand a video decoder chip. Would make my battery last longer, too. I wonder if they will sell a DIY chip kit ;) - Gigabyte, on 10/12/2007, -7/+27I just ate a tomato.
- kazimir34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16"able to play and encode video on the fly"
You missed the useful part. - flipmeat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16I have two words for you: 1080i camwhores.
- mrgreen4242, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Well, the article indicates it'd be $50 for an encoder/decoder chip, so that probably adds significant expense. Plus, the h264 chip in an iPod is limited to 640x480 and, presumably, the chips they'd pick for PCs would do 1080p HD video and be quite a bit more costly.
If this is true, which I'm not convinced of at all, it'll be really great news. I'd love to be able do faster than real time transcodes to h264 for my iPod (from DVD or TiVo) for obvious reasons, but also be able to do very high quality rips of DVDs quickly to archive them in ~1gb per movie files and then faster than real-time transcode them back to MPEG2 for streaming playback on said TiVo.
This would also let Apple sell you an HD copy of a movie, whether it's 720p or 1080p, and then let you quickly transfer a much smaller version onto your iPod, or stream a 480p sized version over to your SDTV, etc etc. Again, not convinced this is true, but it would be cool. I think if it did happen what would be most likely is they come up with a software based solution that can run on supported GPUs very efficiently (as you alluded to). All new Macs would have a GPU that supported that feature, older Macs would run it on the CPU like Core Animation/Video does not, and that would still give you a reason to upgrade to a more expensive computer. Eg, the x3000 in your mini will do real-time/30fps H264 encodes but the x1600 in an iMac will do it 2x realtime, and the 7800GT in a Mac Pro will do it at 6x realtime, etc. - zweben, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Because it takes the pressure off the CPU when playing/encoding h.264, so computers that had trouble with, say, playing 1080p video would play it flawlessly.
Although I think all the Intel Macs can play 1080p pretty smoothly. My 1.67GHz PB can't though. - Balanced, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14Cringely is also likely pulling the numbers, at least to an extent, from his ass.
Keep in mind the 'cost breakdowns' anaylsts have tried doing for other products, which don't take into account design costs, price breaks for volume purchases (You think Apple pays list for the microdrives in iPods?), etc.
As to the idea itself... Could be neat, but could be a short-term thing if H.264 doesn't stick around for long or is superceded... You wouldn't want an over-specialized ASIC. - LocalH, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11@ebfoxbat:
Sorry, no. Uncompressed 1080p is MASSIVE.
1920 x 1080 x 32bpp x 60fps = 3981312000bps = 3888000Kbps = 3796.8Mbps = roughly 3.7Gbps
Even if you account for a true 24fps stream, it's still massive, although much more feasible:
1920 x 1080 x 32bpp x 24fps = 1592524800bps = 1555200Kbps = 1518.75Mbps = roughly 1.5Gbps - UGM2099, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11That's interesting news. You have to wonder what Apple's reasons are for this. Is it to allow for the quick and painless conversion of all sorts of video to h.264 to be streamed to the Apple TV? DVR functionality would be nice although it seems Apple's strategy is always going to focus on paid downloads but to have options would give them a greater position in the set-top market.
- UGM2099, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12Get right out of town!
- NSResponder, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10We have that. It's called the CPU.
-jcr - xioner, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9It would be great... but beware the source... Cringly is always offering up insane ideas.
- mrgreen4242, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I assume you mean the lowliest Mac still being used (lots of G3's out there serving as people's daily use system) where Cringly means the lowliest Mac being currently sold.
- greedycheese, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Somehow I don't think this article means what you think it means.
- EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"Then the encoding chip would get hot..."
They apparently don't get very hot or use much power. Don't forget they are pretty specialized chips. - DeusNova, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Watch everyone in the fansub scene switch to a Mac soon...
- mrgreen4242, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"I know, that's why it's great. But the bus that the BluRay drive is on must be able to handle that. Apple isn't going to put a BR drive on a bus that can't do 1080p. Thus it feasible to double that bus and allow enough bandwidth to ship the coded file to the chip and then the decoded file to... whatever you need to, presumably the graphics chipset."
You're not getting what he is saying... the BR drive needs be connected to a bus that will transmit COMPRESSED 1080p data. IDE has enough bandwidth for that. The computer is then decompressing the video and pushing it over the video bus to the graphics card to display it. If you put the decoder in the drive then the connection from the drive to the computer would have to have about 4GB/s of bandwidth to move the already decompressed video stream to the computer and into the video subsystem, which is not possible with any standard out there right now. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5it also sets up the possibility of video phone capabilities with HD quality.
think of the iPhone with one of those chips and you've got a video phone in your pocket. - TheRealDeal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"able to play and encode video on the fly"
You missed the useful part.
That would be absolutey huge. Bye, bye transcoding...... - EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@LocalH
I know, that's why it's great. But the bus that the BluRay drive is on must be able to handle that. Apple isn't going to put a BR drive on a bus that can't do 1080p. Thus it feasible to double that bus and allow enough bandwidth to ship the coded file to the chip and then the decoded file to... whatever you need to, presumably the graphics chipset. - NSResponder, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6$50 is very expensive for any component that's going to go into millions of machines. That's more than Apple pays for the DVD drive, and probably close to the cost of the power supply.
-jcr - stoppedcode12, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4No I think what he means is we have more cores in processors in the future, we will have specialized cores (accelerators) to accelerate certain applications that are not optimized for the cpu.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4No, Apple's strategy is to sell iPods and Macs.
Apple's reasons would be if they are working on deals to allow DVD importing into iTunes that would produce FairPlay (or otherwise DRMed) protected files, as that would take most of the pain of ripping & encoding movies away and make it more comparable to the CD-ripping experience that currently exists.
And that would definitely sell more iPods and Macs. - codyfrisch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I have a huge need to encode and decode H.264 on the fly as a video editor. Mostly encode for output. Decoding could be useful but we tend to use formats more suited for editing than h.264.
- EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4A chip designed specifically for decoding or encoding h.264 will do so better, faster, cooler, for less power than your GPU and CPU combine.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed."
Next time, just put Cringely's name in the submission somewhere so I know up front to bury as inaccurate. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"think of the iPhone with one of those chips and you've got a video phone in your pocket."
I can virtually guarantee the iPhone will have a chip capable of encoding/decoding h.264 on the fly. It'll likely be integrated into its main processor (if it is Marvell's Mohanans/PXA3xx or (doubtfully) the Freescale MX31).
As for the rest of their products, I'm not sure I'll believe it until I see it. While it's likely they could wire up one of these ARMs (or any one of the dozens like it with Hardware MPEG-4), the expense of retooling their hardware to do it, and then writing the OS support software to back it just seems like a lot of work for something so trivial as hardware video decoding. If they've chosen a chip that can do hardware 1080p MPEG-4 all by itself, on the other hand, it could splash quite well, but the expense of the chip alone makes the solution highly unlikely. People who want hardware MPEG-4 modules usually want them to encode as well as decode video; digital cameras and cellphone chipmakers. It's just out of place to see this kind of hardware in a traditional computer.
So for now I'll call his bluff. - UGM2099, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3My 1.6Ghz Mini w/ 2GB RAM can play 1080p well 90% of the time but it drops frames here and there especially during portions of video with lots of particles or heavy movement.
- totorototoro, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5ugm2099, actually, that is more a reason for someone like Apple (and MS, for that matter) to NOT include effortless hardware encoding-given how tightly they want to control what goes onto their devices. Its why we don't see Xvid/DivX/mkv. etc. native support, except from smaller vendors. (No question that being able to convert all formats effortlessly would spur some of US towards buying an AppleTV/Media Center, etc..., just wondering if that is in THEIR perceived best interests)
- mrgreen4242, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If it's done right, though, then it would still be useful. Let's say that you can do realtime software encoding on a CPU in 18 months. You can also do realtime encoding on a specialized chip now. So you upgrade CPUs, buy a new machine with a new CPU and the endcoder, whatever. Result: you can start h264 encoding now, and then in 18 months you can encode 2 streams at once, or better yet, imo, you can (both now and then) encode one stream while actively editing another with little to no slowdown on either process.
Then you're forgetting about laptops, where even if they have a CPU that COULD do it, it's much more likely you wouldn't want to for power consumption and heat issues, whereas a specialized chip would minimize those two concerns. A SIGNIFICANT portion of Apple's sales are from laptops. - okto, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Hey, 1998 called. They want their anti-Mac punditry back.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"I was going to try to find out how expensive it would be to do it on a FPGA, but opencores.com doesn't have any H264 algorithms listed."
Why would they? H.264 is patented out the wazoo, so it'd be pretty silly of anyone who's written a hardware H.264 system to go and open source it (here's for wishing though).
The hardware to do it's pretty cheap if you're willing to build the board yourself and have the skills to do it (BGA soldering at home is virtually impossible), else you're going to spend a few bucks. The FPGA's will run you about $30-50 depending on how big your code ends up being (I'd start simple and try to build some quick quantizers or MDCTs in parallel that can be used to do hardware decoding of JPEGs and other MPEG data). There's plenty of help out there on the Internet if you get lost. - plagiats, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is just another RUMOR. Take it as it is and wait for Apple to announce something before even considering being happy. Or you'll be disappointed.
- NSResponder, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Guys,
I would love for this to be true (in fact, it would be a very good thing for my company), but it's not. No current Apple products have hardware encoding capabilities. So, if they rolled it out right now, this month, then they will have introduced a capability that becomes moot in about a year and a half, which is when we'll have CPUs that can handle real-time encoding of H.264 in software. They're simply not going to spend that kind of engineering effort on such a short product life.
I keep my ear to the ground regarding H.264 encoding, and nobody's got a single-chip HD encoder even sampling yet. There are several SD encoders ranging from a single-chip encoder that we're using in our products, to FGPA cores and DSP software that do all or part of the work of encoding, but most of these are either limited to the Baseline profile (which leaves out a lot of the clever tricks that are available in the Main and High profiles), or they don't work in real-time.
What I think is likely, is that ATI and NVidia will include an H264 decoder in their GPUs pretty soon, but hardware-assisted encoding in every Mac just isn't likely.
-jcr - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"How many people in the world want to record video on their computer?"
I guess you completely forgot about iChatAV, the integrated lid cameras on the *Books and the integrated camera on the iMac. Apple's moving big into the video conferencing frontier, can't do that without encoding the video for transmission somehow. Oh, and then there are the millions of YouTube camwhores, DVR fanatics who recode from TV Tuners, DVD-backupers, the list goes on and on. - muka3d, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2To put it simply, H.264 gives you equivalent (usually better) visual quality than DivX/XviD and the likes, at half the filesize.
- jasutton, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5How about an upgrade card for my Dual G4? :)
I know it's not the newest thing on the planet, but I don't need to upgrade the whole machine either. - rowlodge, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3the chip on my ibook gets hot whenever i'm rendering anything, i take it, that would take the strain off it.
- HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's hooey.
Future Macs will have H.264 assist on the mobo, and here's why.
Under Vista, Windows will not allow you to use an add-in (PCIe, AGP, etc.) card for video decode acceleration. So Intel is adding video decode acceleration to their chipsets. They started a while back.
Apple uses Intel chipsets. So Apple will have HW H.264 assist.
But it isn't going to cost $50, and it isn't for any nefarious reasons.
BTW, despite the comments above, there are plenty of add-in chips that assist H.264 decode and encode (what many might call H.264 decode in HW). Many for desktops and many for portable devices. - chevyorange, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ "DUPPER!"
Supper! - hoyty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2ATI and nVidia already do decoding of H.264 (and MPEG-2/4) on chip. I believe ATI currently does transcoding (encoding) of H.264 on chip as well. Hardware (single use ASIC) based decoding is a good idea since it is a standard and doesn't change. Hardware based encoding isn't as much of a good idea since encoding processes are always improving in quality and speed. Utilizing a general purpose but good at math GPU with software I think would give better results in output quality. The GPU encoding solution will not be better in regards to power and heat most likely, so there is still that trade-off.
- netburnr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It doesnt matter how tied in you are. Apple Employees have to sign a NDA, every single one. Noone in Apple will divulge information as they would loose their job. And Apple has proved that in the past many times.
- blackjack75, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's already true with your GPU. Software can already use your graphics card to accelerate some operations. See CoreImage on macs and similar technologies.
- Blizaine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2my tests show that the core solo mac mini's can not play 1080p but the duo's can. They show about 120% usage (out of 200% for dual cores).
- sv650touring, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8ramble,
How many people in the world want to record video on their computer? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yet again!!!
Seriously, why does anyone listen to him any more??
Even Dvorak is right more often than this guy! - Patranus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Back in the day (B/W G3) Apple was using HW MPEG 2 decoders to decode DVDs (had to get the BTO option for the add-on card to watch DVDs). I *think* that apple introduced software decoding in OS 9 so this may have carried over several generations into the G4 era.
This article make since in that it really does not make since to have the CPU do all of the work. It also does not make since to have the graphics card do all the work. With the price of these chips, assuming the article is correct, this would be a great play.
Now I do not think that it will only do H.264 but will do other HD formats. If this is introduced, it would probably be introduced along side of the introduction of Apples Blu-Ray Disc drive (yes apple is part of the association for those of you who did not know - think MS is HD-DVD and who could have guessed that Disney is part of the Blu-Ray association and Apple is part of the Blu-Ray association ;) ). It would make more since to have HW decode all HD and not just H.264 - but what do I know. -
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