Apple to use dedicated movie chips?

Rumours of HD video editing capabilities

12 August 2008 9:50 GMT / By Katie Scott

It's all rumours at the moment, but there are whisperings on the web that Apple is going to make a break into HD movie editing.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, and Electronista, some of Apple's products currently in development could have a new chipset that would accelerate both decoding and encoding video, offloading much of the work from the main system processor.

We don't know which products are going to get the uypodate but the sources suggest it could be available before the end of September.

Most Macs can already play up to 1080p video with no additional help, so the reports suggest that the hardware may be designed instead "for HD video editing by reducing video creation times or else for processing live HD video from the webcams present on iMacs and MacBooks, which are capable of HD-level resolutions already but have to scale down to lower resolutions to accommodate most existing hardware".

Adding to the rumours, Public Broadcast Service's Robert Cringely is claiming that Apple will use an NTT DoCoMo-derived H.264 video processor that could compress HD video quickly enough to make HD video chat or certain iTunes operations much more efficient.

This part is said to have been relatively expensive at $50 a pop but would potentially be an Apple-exclusive feature.