iTV, cablecard, .n

[rogerhoward at rogerroger.org]

On Dec 11, 2006, at 4:03 PM, Shawn Erickson wrote:

> 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.

Sorry if I wasn't more clear, but there is a vast amount of  
functionality present in Quicktime that cannot be replicated on  
Airport Express either. Just a few examples:

- Sprites
- Interactivity
- Flash tracks
- Quicktime VR panorama and object movies
- Text tracks (closed captions, etc)
- Multiple audio tracks
- Movie-in-movie
- Dynamically loaded content
- Quartz Composer compositions

Anyway, as I said I'd fully expect the iTV to play anything that the  
iPod can, with the addition of higher resolutions. But to say it'll  
support anything that Quicktime can play is ignoring a huge amount of  
functionality possible in Quicktime content. Suggesting the same for  
Airport Express just demonstrates how poorly Apple has defined  
Quicktime, as this is a pretty technical crowd.

Cheers -Rh