Not Quite a Blog

Link: http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/eyetv500.php

Lest you believe that Apple isn't evil:

The EyeTV software relies on no hardware acceleration for mpeg playback, which explains the processor load. The entire burden of decoding and displaying the high-def mpeg2 file falls on the CPU. When I asked EyeTV why it did not take advantage of the hardware acceleration included in the graphics cards installed in modern Macs, they explained that Apple has not made those interfaces easily accessible to third party developers. Enabling hardware acceleration is thus not likely to be in the cards for EyeTV's software in the near future.

UPDATE: More from SIMS student Dave Schlossberg... (you should be reading him):

I recently learned about Podzilla -- a Linux distro for the iPod. iPod already has some recording support, but here's the kicker -- you can pay the $50 for the iPod recording hardware and get 16-bit recordings at 8kHz (telephone-ish quality) or you can install Podzilla for free and record whatever you want at up to 96kHz (DVD audio quality).

Why is recording crippled on the iPod? Well, part of the answer is that the market for voice recording hardware is pretty small. Dedicated voice recorders are incredibly expensive, and Apple is not at all in that market. They're out to sell their iPods and get people to use iTunes. Furthermore, voice recording doesn't need amazing quality, so the low audio rate is sufficient for most.

However, this is not a market issue. If Apple really wanted to make an iPod capable of high quality recording, they could have. Their competitors, such as Creative, Archos, and iRiver, have MP3 players full quality MP3 and WAV recording (44kHz, CD quality). My Creative Jukebox 3 even has digital recording inputs. In fact if Apple was concerned about being competitive, they would have included high quality recording in the iPods from the very beginning.