[oliv3r]

@oliv3r, I doubt it, you can't really break up decoding like that. well you 'could' but you are insane if you do.
broadcom did not bypass anything, they paid for the license and that cost is included in the purchase price. the key was volume, broadcom made a boatload of chd's. And yes, completly opensource for BCM 970012/15 kernel (GPLv2) and userland (LGPLv2).

limaproject might eventually reach the level of what arm gives the vendor to make those libs. In about 3-5 years.

@j1nx, their 1st problem is even dealing with X11 in the first place... You want a desktop arm or embedded arm ? 99 percent of users want to boot right into XBMC and that means embedded.

Not so sure if it is THAT insane :p

Looking at a very simple example, JPEG, there is a few very distinct things that happen. Splitting into blocks of 8x8, perform DCT, perform some compression.

Splitting of the blocks you do in your driver, creating nice blocks that can be fed to your GPU/VPU. DCT you run through your shaders for example and when that is done, another pair of shaders does the compression. The DCT and Compression bits can be two seperate function initiated by the driver. The data would have to be stored somewhere on your GPU/VPU obviously, you don't want to pump all data in and out constantly. Having these two functions, you can also do other computations that also use DCT and the same compression.

This would technically allow you to reuse your hardware for different codecs and the frontend library, that can be updated (opposite of the silicon that would do the DCT and compression).

Isn't that basically what XvMC did for years, albeit badly supported by drivers

I know h264 is completely a different beast from jpeg, but if XvMC did it for mpeg2, it shouldn't be entirely impossible. Heck, I even recall reading that they trying to use XvMC on one of the newer codecs (may even be h264) to 'accelerate' decoding of this.

Anyway, all this doesn't matter in the end, if the VPU actually does the whole thing in silicon. A liittle bit of a pitty really, technically having an accelerator for several bits of video decoding makes the device last much longer past many more generation of codecs and possibly bypassing licensing issues.