iTV, cablecard, .n

[Roger Howard]

On Tue, December 12, 2006 9:01 am, j o a r wrote:
>
> On 12 dec 2006, at 08.59, Matt Johnston wrote:
>
>> I would have thought that the iTV would essentially do the same.
>> Course it would mean a lot of processing on the client side.....
>
> Ouch. I hope they have something better in mind. If they for example
> were to support a fair share of the more common standard video
> formats, a re-encode would be an exception rather than the rule.

Same here; it would be a major flop if it required realtime transcoding of
video. It works for audio because they are transcoding to a very
computationally easy (and thus bandwidth unfriendly) audio format; to do
something similar with video you'd be transcoding to something like PNG or
even Photo JPEG codecs, but then there's no way you'd be streaming those.
To transcode in realtime to a stream-friendly video format just for
playback would be a not-insignificant CPU load and quality hit.

I think it would be far more likely (and reasonable) to natively support
(on the iTV) the most popular subset of the video/audio codecs in
Quicktimes and stream them without any transcoding.

>
> I don't see why they shouldn't be able to support multiple video
> formats, even if I agree with Roger that supporting *everything* that
> QT supports would be both difficult and mostly pointless.

Yep, I just wanted to make the point clear that supporting *anything* that
plays in Frontrow/Quicktime is unrealistic, and probably not favorable
from a cost/benefit perspective. In most cases it also wouldn't make sense
- what would an iTV do with interactive Quicktime content designed for
mouse/kbd control?