[davilla]

over simplification of NEON. for example, an h264 decoder written in NEON is very non-trivial. If you start now, then maybe in a year it might be done.

Well, you say there aren`t any written NEON decoders yet. I thought there are, because I saw some full-neon and non-neon called apks.
What are you using for currentl if nor for decoding?

Correct, there are not any pure NEON video decoder except what we get from FFMpeg.

Hardware video decode is done by dedicated video decoders provided on the arm SOCs. Arm SOC vendors use different IP designs so any API is not common to all devices. One must use a higher level API such as OpenMax.

I think you are confusing the need for NEON with hardware video decoders. Given a fast enough ARM device with multiple cores, video decode can be handled purely in software (FFMpeg), this is evident from reports from tegra3 devices being able to decode 720p HD content. But software decode costs CPU and more CPU means greater power consumption. For example, the Nexus 7 doing 720p HD content seems to saturate two cores, while the same content on an Amlogic based device idles at less than 10 percent.

NEON give the headroom to do all the other things that XBMC does. Like generate a thumbnail in a timely fashion. No NEON and this simple task can take 5 to 10 seconds or more. With NEON, less than a second.