My cable provider (Comcast) is providing almost all channels in AVCHD which uses MPEG4 AVC/H.264 compression. Is Channels using the hardware decoding for AVCHD on Apple TV, iPad and iPhone? I understand the limitations with MPEG2 streams but I think there should be hardware to decode MPEG4. If no, I would like to make this a feature request.
Hardware decoding is currently enabled on iPhone/iPad to conserve battery, but disabled on Apple TV because the hardware decoder chip has a buggy error correction implementation there and creates video artifacts when there are signal errors.
We filed a bug report with Apple about the decoding issue a while ago: http://www.openradar.me/radar?id=5007794612731904
Is H.265 possible on phones and web browsers? I heard it can cut down on up to 40% of the bandwidth which could help stream higher resolutions remotely.
Most can handle H.265/HEVC wih no problem. The real problem is encoding H.265. Hardware accelerated H.265 encoding is usually only found on newer models, and not that common. Software-based encoding is quite slow, and a heavy drain on system resources.