[thefrog]

If it says it supports VC1 and doesn't support VC1, I foresee some legal liability and bad publicity for Amazon.

Well, as I said, I suspect the FTV supports the simple and main profile of VC1 (aka WMV3) but not the advanced one, which is *commonly* known as VC1 and is used in bluray.
I would be interesting that someone tries to find such a WMV3 sample and test.

So Amazon is probably safe on the legal side if WMV3 is confirmed, but would be edgy regarding misleading its users in thinking they could watch their ripped VC1 bluray.

I looked through a bunch of Qualcomm developer pages but did not feel comfortable downloading their SDK. I had hoped that there would be a way to enumerate the codecs, but failed in that.

So you suspect that WVC1 (advanced) profile D ( levels 3 and 4? ) are missing? That sounds plausible. But from a licensing standpoint, I don't know why/how you would pay for the license pool and then not get the 'important' implementation.

I still suspect that there is a binary blob in someone's inbox that contains the 'rights' that didn't make it to a production image... These things happen.

Then again, you may rightfully consider me naïvely optimistic on some points... That also happens.