engadgethd.com — We quickly realized that the Apple TV wasn't going to be a HD powerhouse and our tests have indicated as much -- we have also discovered that the problem is not the hardware. We opened up our Apple TV and added a few codecs and we were very surprised at the results...
Apr 11, 2007 View in Crawl 4
bjdrawApr 12, 2007
The Apple TV just like other CE devices does the heavy lifting in hardware not software. You need a fast CPU to decode HD in software, but a little chip can do it very easily. In the example of the ATV it can easily play 720P HD encoded with H.264, but can't smoothly playback 720p encoded with MPEG-2, something almost any computer released in the past 3 years can do. The GPU on the Apple TV does the work.Also interesting is that I copied the H.264 QT component from my ATV to my MacBook Pro and saw a 10% reduction in CPU utilzation when compared to the native MBP H.254 QT component. Obviously Apple tweaked this to offload decoding to the GPU rather than the CPU.
rygonwanApr 12, 2007
The Apple TV (and iPhone) is running a slightly smaller version of OS X but it is still OS X. OS X is going to have a major new release, probably within the next two months. So I think it is safe to assume that these consumer devices will see regular software upgrades and new features at the same time the computers do.
topher06Apr 12, 2007
Why are you quibbling about this. Apple comes out with a TV set-top box, and because it isn't great people start making excuses about it. Why even bother adding HD capabilities to AppleTV if it can't do it well out of the box. Apple is soon to venture into offering HD content through iTunes, so they fully intend AppleTV to be an HD content provider. It doesn't need to be a "powerhouse" for the power user, my up-converting DVD player I got for $80 supports HD well, turning standard def DVD's and DIVX content into very acceptable output on an HD television. For the small amount of time I spend to burn a RW DVD with content makes up for the over $200 I saved by not buying an Apple TV.Also, from many of the reviews I have read, even standard def playback is lousy.Face it, every once in a while, Apple releases a crap product. Don't defend it by saying it was never intended to be a decent device in the first place. Apple spent a lot of time developing the AppleTV, for it to offer lousy performance and quality out of the box without 3rd party hacks is lame, period.
topnotchnetApr 12, 2007
slingcatcher
thatsunpossibleApr 12, 2007
Yeah Apple would never support known standards, like AAC and H.264.
nixfuApr 12, 2007
You only need a 3ghz if you don't have a MPEG hardware card...just like MythTV. If you get a hardware decoder card then the CPU requirements go way down.And we also know from rumors that Apple is planning on putting H264 hardware chips in all their products soon, this makes encode/decode if H264 nearly CPU free.
darktenApr 12, 2007
Wow.Just...wow.I don't know what they are doing at engadgethd, but umm, the 720p stuff *I* encode (by hand...not using the quicktime export to TV option) from 1080p sources looks *fantastic* on my 40" Bravia...*and* its streams without error over our 802.11g.5000kbps H.264 video encoded *correctly* looks fantastic, and is "conservatively" equivalent in visual appearance to about a 13000kbps MPEG2 stream. Some say more.Its quite a good deal as far as space/quality is concerned and I'm sure will look even better from sources better than I have (which are high bitrate MPEG2 streams...so it like compressed compressed video, i know...but you get the idea.)
coder_cottonApr 12, 2007
not now :) <a class="user" href="http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/12/apple-announces-leopard-delays-due-to-the-iphone/">http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/12/apple-announces-leopard-delays-due-to-the-iphone/</a>