[angeloaz]

Angeloaz, I did not realize that the AFTV separate hardware to handle MPEG2, but that it just has a really good CPU to handle it. Not that I think you're wrong, by any means, I am not knowledgeable on the details of such topics. Regardless of whether my AFTV is hardware decoding or software decoding MPEG2, it's doing it well.

You can verify this empirically by doing the following:

1. Play an MPEG2 stream (with ligstagefright on, mediacodec off) and pull up XBMC's CodecInfo screen (keyboard 'O' key)
   
2. On that screen, you should see "stf-mpeg2" as your decoder and you should see about 30%-40% of two CPU cores being consumed. This is about the same you'll see for an H.264 stream (which everyone agrees is hardware decoded on AFTV).
   
   
3. Now in XBMC's acceleration settings, turn on "software acceleration" instead of "hardware acceleration". There appears to be a bug here, as you have to unselect both libstagefright and mediacodec (or something like that) before switching to "software acceleration", otherwise the setting won't stick.
   
4. Play an MPEG2 stream and you'll see your decoder is now "ff-mpeg2" and your CPU usage will be about 70%-100% of all 4 cores. You'll probably stutter and drop frames too (as I did).