> makes me think that a substantial number of video cards have included YUV decoding capability in hardware since the previous millennium. You are correct, and

> makes me think that a substantial number of video cards have included YUV decoding capability in hardware since the previous millennium. You are correct, and you can find details on that by reading the card documentation (as far as it is available). That was in particular the case when cards had a fixed-function rendering pipeline. With the advent of more general purpose cores on the GPU for the rendering pipeline, YUV decoding has been offloaded to them.