>What's the status of hardware acceleration of next-generation video standards (h.265, VP9, something else)? You're only likely to find proper hardware acceler

>What's the status of hardware acceleration of next-generation video standards (h.265, VP9, something else)? You're only likely to find proper hardware acceleration for the top codecs like h.264, not much else. There's going to be software acceleration for everything else. So from the MPEG[2] group, as you might expect, there's h.265. But then there's a whole new undertaking by the big guys like Netflix, Google, etc. which is called AOMedia[1]. Now they have this new codec called AV1[3] which is still in development. And it's open source and royalty free which is not usually what happens in the MPEG group because they charge royalties and have patents on the codecs/standards they have. >what makes generic GPU hardware and software not sufficient for hardware acceleration of video decoding? Now I'm not a video encoding/decoding expert, but just enough to be dangerous actually. What makes GPUs well suited is that they have many, many more cores so each core can handle a specific area of the video output that needs to be decoded. It's called parallel programming. Whatever can efficiently be implemented on GPUs better than CPUs, people are doing it. This is recently being called GPGPU programming, where tasks that were thought were better done by CPU are being re-programmed for the GPU since the development and performance in GPUs have been going through the roof. Now when it comes to the why, think of it this way. Your average complex computation is more like lifting a couple really heavy boulders. So you need a strong person to lift it. So that strong person is your CPU core, with complexity and high clock rate. But video encoding is not that complex at the pixel level. So it is more like picking lots (thousands) of tennis balls. GPUs are like having a bunch of kids (current gen GPUs have ~2000 cores even at the mid-range) who are no where as strong as the strong CPU guy, but you can guess who will get the task done faster. [1]:http://aomedia.org/about-us/ http://aomedia.org/about-us/ [2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Picture_Experts_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Picture_Experts_Group [3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1