Comment by kasabali
3 years ago
"computation-intensive media" = videos
Seriously, when is the last time mobile phones used hardware decoding for showing images? Flip phones in 2005?
I know camera apps use hardware encoding but I doubt gallery apps or browsers bother with going through the hardware decoding pipeline for hundreds of JPEG images you scroll through in seconds. And when it comes to showing a single image they'll still opt to software decoding because it's more flexible when it comes to integration, implementation, customization and format limits. So not surprisingly I'm not convinced when I repeatedly see this claim that mobile phones commonly use hardware decoding for image formats and software decoding speed doesn't matter.
I don't know the current status of web browsers, ut hardware encoding and decoding for image formats is alive and well. Not really relevant for showing a 32x32 GIF arrow like on HN, but very important when browsing high resolution images with any kind of smoothness.
If you don't really care about your users' battery life you can opt to disable hardware acceleration within your applications, but it's usually enabled by default, and for good reason.
> hardware encoding and decoding for image formats is alive and well
I keep hearing and hearing this but nobody has ever yet provided a concrete real world example of smart phones using hw decoding for displaying images.
Hardware acceleration of image decoding is very uncommon in most consumer applications.