CPU usage streaming video to Apple TV

[bp1000]

I got a surprise tonight as i looked at the Activity monitor on my mba for an unrelated reason.

My wife was streaming something from it whilst i was doing some work.

It looks like iTunes is using 50%-70% CPU streaming a video! Is this normal? I thought all the decoding was done on the Apple TV. To put it in perspective, playing the same m4v file on my mba at the same time but using VLC, it uses 4x less CPU to actually watch the video than it does to stream it to Apple TV.

It briefly drops to 2% goes up to 20% then flicks back up to 50%-70%

 

[roidy]

Somethings wrong there, my Windows version of iTunes idles at around 2% cpu use and briefly jumps to around 5-6% when I start streaming a HD video and then goes back down to around 2-3% and never moves again. As you say all the decoding is done on the ATV the only thing taking a hit on your computer will be your network usage.

 

[sulliweb]

Ditto for me, and mine's running on a CPU with an Atom processor. I barely see a blip before it drops back to 1%-2%.

Is iTunes.exe using that much or something else? I had the MobileMe Control Panel installed at one point, and when I was having some internet issues, it was pounding away like crazy... but it was a funky process name... Don't remember what it was.

Just a thought...

 

[bp1000]

I think it must have been a temporary thing.

Now it's less than 1% and spikes to 2% when streaming