> a H.264 hardware decoder can decode all H.264 files and > video decoding is easily parallelizable At a previous job, I don't know if it was just the field I was in or just bad luck, but having to explain this over and over again was kind of a personal nightmare. That being said, this is an excellent list!
Curious - Why is this? Does this assume streaming video, and you can't look ahead in the stream? If you can jump ahead, it would seem to be easy to have multiple threads, starting at key frames to decode the content. You'd have to splice them together, but this seems possible.
1) You are now assuming that "seeking to a position will produce the same output as decoding to a position"; even if the video is well-formed (and you don't end up with massive issues where the key frames just don't work correctly) you are likely going to end up with subtle discontinuities between every segment. 2) You are now going to have to be buffering a couple seconds worth of uncompressed video somewhere, probably not on the GPU, leading to a much higher I/O bandwidth requirement somewhere that isn't good at that, so this is only probably going to be sort of parallel (FWIW, I believe most people who try to do parallel video decoding are assuming that they can have different parts of the encoder concentrate on different sections of the screen, which sounds good until you see how non-local video decoding can be).