I'm not sure (a) is true. I've worked with advanced DSPs, like TI's DM-642. It's popular to do H.264 compression. The hardware acceleration in DSPs like this ha

I'm not sure (a) is true. I've worked with advanced DSPs, like TI's DM-642. It's popular to do H.264 compression. The hardware acceleration in DSPs like this have nothing do to with H.264 codecs, you're right. But the software libraries to do the best in class compression are H.264. And I'm not going to write my own compression algorithm. So the choice is lower quality or licensing libraries to take care of the compression. The software for this DSP would certainly be a hell of a lot cheaper with a Google backed solution. And it might even be free.