That's for a $50 computer with 45 millions copies sold, with Linux being the only OS supported by manufacturer. On other computers can be much worse.
By comparison, install Windows on a computer, install a GPU driver, and Media Foundation API will use the hardware to decode and encode all supported formats, no recompilation needed.
Access to hardware acceleration has absolutely nothing to do with the standards of the formats themselves. Clearly, since open implementations exist, open source developers know how the formats function. The problem with HW accel is that hardware vendors keep the details of how to access functions of the hardware is kept secret or otherwise locked behind proprietary code. But the same can be true of completely open standards like AV1.
> since open implementations exist, open source developers know how the formats function.
These formats are way more complicated than you think they are. Just because open source implementations decode/encode something doesn't mean the implementation is standard-compliant. My one certainly is not.
Not true. On x86 there is VDPAU/VAAPI for accessing HW encoders and decoders (GPU/CPU) and it works perfectly. FFMPEG and players support it out of the box on Arch Linux. HW encoders produce much worse quality than CPU encoding. But who needs HW encode/decode, there is no problem accessing them on Linux!
Note the wordings like “for some Linux users”, “restricted to AMD/Intel graphics cards”. Also check the comments, there’re many other issues, with 4k on Intel GPUs, different desktop managers, and so on.
I think if these MPEG4 standards were freely available, Linux kernel developers would come up with something better. For instance, V4L2 API portable across hardware, with a higher-level wrapper around it.
If you look at MS Media Foundation docs, you’ll see portions of the API surface (like h264-specific media type attributes, or the bit stream, or the APIs for dealing with containers) taken directly from these ISO/IEC specs.
That's for a $50 computer with 45 millions copies sold, with Linux being the only OS supported by manufacturer. On other computers can be much worse.
By comparison, install Windows on a computer, install a GPU driver, and Media Foundation API will use the hardware to decode and encode all supported formats, no recompilation needed.