As you may know from other place, FFmpeg got RV40 decoder. There’s still some hope that FFmpeg will get RV30 decoder as well (it needs loop filter and squishing some bugs).
Some notes about performance:
- PPC G4 1.42GHz — on par
- Celeron 600MHz (inside ASUS Eee) — significantly slower (2 minutes of the same source decoded in 64 and 82 seconds by binary and native decoders respectively)
When I switch motion compensation functions from C implementations to optimised H.264 counterparts (they are slightly different so the picture quality gets worse) native decoder becomes faster than binary one by several percents on x86 and even faster on PPC. Conclusion: if you want fast decoding then submit SIMD versions of motion compensation functions.