These speculations have been circulating the Web since columnist Robert X. Cringely wrote for PBS a piece about a rumor he believes to be a fact, according to which the Cupertino based company is willing to take the bold step of introducing H.264 hardware decoding in all their lines of computers, even for Mac Minis.

This would happen in the near future, certainly this year. Could this be the much talked about all-line hardware upgrade?

PCs now use software decoders for video processing, unlike specialized, much cheaper, DVD players that use a $7 MPEG-2 decoder chip instead, with a far better outcome. Cringely says it's not the saving of $7 that makes PC manufacturers not use such chips on their computers.

The use of hardware decoders would possibly discourage the buying of high-end equipment (since the processor is left out of the otherwise consuming task of decoding), to the producer's loss.

Robert X. Cringely thinks this addition will compliment their iTunes and other video distribution efforts Apple would be making. This would mean every single computer Apple makes should have the "same base performance level", from Mac Mini to 4-core Mac Pro.

It normally takes "a multi-core machine with a lot of memory to support real 1080p (HDTV) decoding, but soon you'll be able to do that easily on a Mac Mini while leaving the main CPU to handle other chores", says Cringely.

The adding of this chip (that will supposedly cost about $50) could cost Apple a lot of money (over $500 million, according to Cringely), in both production costs and loss of high-end equipment sales. So why invest all this capital, just to make Mac users a little happier? Cringely says the explanation lies in the additional capability of this chip to also perform video encoding.

"This will change everything. Soon even the lowliest Mac will be able to effortlessly record in background one or more video signals," turning Macs into "superb DVR machines with TiVo-like functionality" that will output smaller files. This could potentially revolutionize the world of user-produced video and Apple (along YouTube) will have only to gain.

This would be quite a bright future for Macs. I'd surely like to see Cringely's words proven right. If you've got an opinion regarding this H.264 rumor, feel free to comment below.