There is hardware acceleration of video playback on several levels. I assume you mean offloading stream decoding to the GPU in this context, because other means of acceleration were implemented quite a while ago.
Hardware acceleration of video decoding has been possible in GStreamer 0.10 (e.g. it works like that on my maemophone), but this never was widely used. GStreamer 1.0 supports hardware acceleration with VA-API more or less out of the box. However, the main problem here is not the media players but in the GPU drivers. Only Intel driver provides VA-API acceleration and only on recent GPUs. Nvidia's binary blob provides VDPAU acceleration, which is not leveraged by GStreamer at this point (though some monolithic players seem to be able to use it). However, this is being actively worked on in GStreamer. The situation with other drivers is much worse: Nouveau does not provide any decoding acceleration yet (they're still reverse-engineering the relevant GPU unit). AMD binary blob has yet-another-acceleration-api, but it's undocumented and doesn't even work properly (see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_xvba_xbmc&num=1) Open-source AMD (r600g) driver provides video decoding acceleration but it works only for full-screen playback and not for all codecs. It's also rather inefficient because AMD does not provide documentation on the dedicated video decoding engine out of fear of compromising Digital Right Mismanagement on an OS sold by a certain small and soft corporation, so the decoder uses GPU shaders instead. Generally speaking, it's very hard for modular backends like GStreamer those monolithic backends like MPlayer. In MPlayer you can easily change how the whole thing works relatively easily. In GStreamer you have to redesign the whole thing, come up with new APIs that suit everybody, rewrite all plugins for the API change... so MPlayer and VLC always will be one step ahead in low-level features. On the other hand they're rather inflexible; for example, it's very hard if not impossible to implement Audience's pop-up preview using MPlayer as a backend. But we shouldn't concern ourselves with those monolithic backends at all because we can't ship any of them due to some legal crap with libavcodec. -- Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff OS architect @ elementary -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~elementary-dev-community Post to : elementary-dev-community@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~elementary-dev-community More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp