Personally I guess the very reason to have a special (and costly) hardware unit for video decoding is DRM. My naive understanding leads me to believe that most video decoding steps can be done in the 3D shaders anyway and that only the need to keep the encryption chain intact "justifies" dedicated hardware.
Perhaps it's viable to in worst case not touch the UVD unit at all and do most stuff with a set of shaders anyway? This would also be rather flexible (yum yum, accelerated Theora and/or Dirac...) ;-)
Downside may be that lower-end parts may not have the required shader-power and that energy-efficiency may not be as great.
Perhaps it's viable to in worst case not touch the UVD unit at all and do most stuff with a set of shaders anyway? This would also be rather flexible (yum yum, accelerated Theora and/or Dirac...) ;-)
Downside may be that lower-end parts may not have the required shader-power and that energy-efficiency may not be as great.
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