h264 decoding in kernel in 5.11 isn't that too late? My 12y/o laptop can decode h264 in hardware what's the point of adding that in the kernel in 2020?
From what I can tell this will be able to take advantage of hardware acceleration, for that matter I'm not sure that software decoding will be supported at all. The novel point here is the stateless part.
VP9 and HEVC (H265) kernel user API exist and are being cleaned up. This takes a lot of time and a lot of testing, so bear with us. We don't have any sillicon with enough spec we could write a driver for that supports AV1 at the moment. When this happens, we'll definitely get that up and running.
Even though most ancient CODEC and it's existing content decodes fine on CPU, the HW decoder uses less power and is better for battery life. This work enables mostly lower power SoC like Allwinner, Rockchip, i.MX8M, RPi4 (HEVC), Mediatek, Microchip, and so on, but also higher capacity chips that can be connted through PCIe to surpass your CPU capacity (Blaize).
Also, understand that difference between the V4L2 and the GPU accelerators. GPU uses command stream channel, which need to be centrally managed. That landed into DRM + Mesa, under the VA-API. DRM drivers could have been an option, but would have required per-HW userspace in Mesa. VA-API also being a miss-fit for some of the sillicon (Hantro based) would have made things more complex then needed.
So that I can enjoy HW decoding on my SBCs that use SoCs for TV boxes (Allwinner H5, H6), on Pinebook Pro, and on Pinephone. Your 12y/o laptop will not do that for me.
