Seeing as you have made some progress playing back media files with different extentions (MKV being the point of interest here, as seen in the teaser video), I was wondering if you could tell me just how far you've been able to push the ATV2G, when it comes to decoding high profile h.264 video files.
A big disappointment with the 1G ATV was its inability to decode higher bit-rate files. MKV is rapidly becoming the most popular container for HD video files, It would be useful to know what the new ATV can really do with them.
Clearly any decoding of unsupported 1080p and even 720p files will be handled by the server (i.e. Mac or PC) just like it works with Air Video/Plex/etc apps. Apple TV won't be able to handle high bitrate encoding and I think the teaser on Firecore's blog includes a server doing live conversion. Unless, of course, Firecore figured out how to do hardware decoding of unsupported formats on ATV2 which I doubt is the case.
What! Firecore have said that they are to support playback from other sources, such as NAS devices, a NAS isn't going to do your decoding, the ATV is.
From the Video, first we see a 'fetching' message, probably from another source? Not necessarily from a PC based client serving content.
A 'transmuxing' message appears, which could be pulling the video and audio streams out of the MKV container and re-muxing them into a file type the ATV likes - then playing them back.