AlleyInsider: QuickTime on a chip?
Silicon Alley Insider is offering "pure speculation" based on a tip that Apple's Fall future product transition is a video upgrade to Apple products that includes a QuickTime encoder/decoder on a chip.
As cool as this would be, I don't personally think it's a significant-enough development to warn investors about. Unless, of course, it's part and parcel of more substantial changes to Apple's product lines.
Having video playback functions handled by a separate microprocessor capable of dealing with the variety of media formats that QuickTime handles could yield performance increases for lower-end Macs (with less-powerful video cards) and battery life savings for handheld devices.
Also, depending on what codecs are included on-board, it could mean an end to countless hours converting video specifically for your iPhone, iPod touch, or Apple TV. Additionally, MacRumors' Arnold Kim notes that it could be of some use for encoding Blu-Ray video.
All I want is DivX AVI playback on my iPod touch. Pretty please?
