Rumor/Speculation: Apple to Take on TiVo

The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007

I'm a bit skeptical, but Bob Cringely thinks that Apple is going to add hardware-based video encoding capability to all Macs. Then Apple could go head to head to with TiVo for recording TV. I don't think this is a good idea because I think the satellite/cable companies have a lock on DVR (Digital Video Recorder) capability and are not going to give it up. Setting up a third party device to control your TV and record is complex and the TV providers are going to keep it that way. But Cringely was predicting Apple TV about 18 months, so maybe my skepticism is misplaced. Whether or not Apple wants to make a Digital Video Recorder, I think faster h.264 encoding would be good for Apple for getting any kind of video you want to your Apple TV and iPod, which both only support MPEG-4 and h.264.

Here's some speculation for you: if you Mac could do real-time encoding to h.264, then it wouldn't matter what codec your video was in. You could play a DVD on your Mac, which would transcode it to h.264 then send it to your Apple TV via wireless. Same thing for a Divx movie or WMV movie or a ripped MPEG-2 file/TS folder or even a HD-DVD/Blu-Ray disc.