> is there actually more than one competing implementation out there? Yes, there are many software decoders out there, usually specialized for certain architec

> is there actually more than one competing implementation out there? Yes, there are many software decoders out there, usually specialized for certain architectures (the team I worked with wrote a decoder for Texas Instruments DSPs, for example). Then there are hardware implementations, which are rarely just "hardware", it's usually hardware-assisted software that does the decoding.