iTV, cablecard, .n

[Shawn Erickson]

On 12/11/06, Kevin Callahan <kcall at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 11, 2006, at 3:39 PM, rogerhoward at rogerroger.org wrote:
>
> >
> > On Dec 11, 2006, at 12:36 PM, j o a r wrote:
> >
> >>> But, it's clear a lot of folks want their recorded shows (not
> >>> just iTMS downloads) to seamlessly integrate with Front Row.
> >>
> >> Anything that can be played in QuickTime can be played in Front
> >> Row, right? I would guess that the same thing holds true for iTV.
> >> Steve likes his home video projects, so I'm sure you will be able
> >> to play more than iTMS downloads through the iTV.
> >
> > Front Row has access to the complete Quicktime stack. Unless the
> > iTV is a repackaged Mac Mini, I would seriously doubt that
> > *anything* that can be played in Front Row will be playable on iTV.

Well if Apple did something like what they did with the Airport
Express it may well be able to play "anything" that QuickTime/iTunes
can play. The Airport Express basically supports an encrypted Apple
Lossless audio stream with iTunes (running on your computer) decoding
whatever you are playing and re-encoding it in Apple Lossless before
being sent off to the Airport Express. In theory Apple could do a
similar thing with video streams (CPU bandwidth may be a limiter to
this however). ...of course this assumes that the iTV is on "dumber"
end of the hardware spectrum.

-Shawn