[natethomas]

My understanding is that there are two different issues. Each hardware decoder uses a separate sdk to provide decoding hooks, and these sdks are private (aka requirement payment or an agreement to see). So until libstagefright came along, it was literally impossible to hook into most hardware decoders (unless you had an agreement of some kind with the hardware provider). Since any agreement we might make with them would require that we openly show the sdk implementation, they simply aren't interested in playing nice.

libstagefright (and more recently MediaCodec) is, to some extent, Google's way of bullying the hardware decoder manufacturers to provide some method of hooking into the hardware decoding. Some manufacturers are willing to play nice with libstagefright (e.g. NVIDIA) and some are not (e.g. Allwinner). And then there are those like AM Logic, who don't implement the libstagefright protocol, but make it easy to hook directly into the decoders openly.

I should note, I could be completely wrong about any or all of that. The only thing I'm REALLY sure about is that Android is a fragmented clusterf***.