LAV Filters (an Open Source implementation of DirectShow/DXVA filters) VP9 support works with Maxwell cards for sure, I have a 780ti somewhere I can check Kepler also, but IIRC it should work.
That said this would work for many video players that use DXVA or have support for external DS filters e.g. VLC/MPC-HC or proprietary players like Splash, but it won't work in a browser. Chrome for example doesn't allow for external filters iirc so you'll see a pretty big CPU jump. For some reason it seems fine on VP9 1080p videos on a Maxwell card CPU is 2-3% but at 4K it jumps to 70-80% I have a feeling that since Maxwell has partial support in the PV block for HEVC and VP9 they might be able to decode 1080p with it and then do full CPU decoding for 4K, I wouldn't expect CPU decoding for 1080p to be so resource efficient otherwise.
This one can work with either a dedicated media player or with Edge, Chrome does it's own thing and I'm not entirely sure what they do and I have no clue about Safari/Opera/Firefox so if some one wants to fill in about them that would be nifty.
Whilst technically DXVA is a software decoder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration It does offload the heavy lifting to the GPU via shaders, so can still some what classify it as "hardware decoding" since softare decoder/encoders are usually defined as CPU only.
I've made a post about how VP9 is offloaded to GPU in this thread, it's done via DXVA/MF on Windows.
You're only likely to find proper hardware acceleration for the top codecs like h.264, not much else. There's going to be software acceleration for everything else. So from the MPEG[2] group, as you might expect, there's h.265. But then there's a whole new undertaking by the big guys like Netflix, Google, etc. which is called AOMedia[1]. Now they have this new codec called AV1[3] which is still in development. And it's open source and royalty free which is not usually what happens in the MPEG group because they charge royalties and have patents on the codecs/standards they have.
>what makes generic GPU hardware and software not sufficient for hardware acceleration of video decoding?
Now I'm not a video encoding/decoding expert, but just enough to be dangerous actually. What makes GPUs well suited is that they have many, many more cores so each core can handle a specific area of the video output that needs to be decoded.
It's called parallel programming. Whatever can efficiently be implemented on GPUs better than CPUs, people are doing it. This is recently being called GPGPU programming, where tasks that were thought were better done by CPU are being re-programmed for the GPU since the development and performance in GPUs have been going through the roof.
Now when it comes to the why, think of it this way. Your average complex computation is more like lifting a couple really heavy boulders. So you need a strong person to lift it. So that strong person is your CPU core, with complexity and high clock rate. But video encoding is not that complex at the pixel level. So it is more like picking lots (thousands) of tennis balls. GPUs are like having a bunch of kids (current gen GPUs have ~2000 cores even at the mid-range) who are no where as strong as the strong CPU guy, but you can guess who will get the task done faster.
[1]:http://aomedia.org/about-us/
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Picture_Experts_Group
Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and ARM all support VP9 acceleration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-7th-gen-core-kaby-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10428/arm-announces-mali-egil-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Hardware_encoding.2Fdecodi...
What's the status of hardware acceleration of next-generation video standards (h.265, VP9, something else)?
It's my understanding that after VP8 was pushed and then superseded rapidly, hardware manufacturers are now leery of implementing anything other than h.264.
And as a follow-on: what makes generic GPU hardware and software not sufficient for hardware acceleration of video decoding? What is it that makes my GPU stupendously good at pushing pixels and training neural nets and physics calculations and so many other things, but not better than my CPU at video decoding? Is there a reason h.265 and such aren't implemented in CUDA?
I don't know much about video encoding, not even enough to be dangerous, so to speak.