There’s a project at freedesktop.org going on, where ATI Radeon cards are getting H.264 hardware acceleration. An AMD employee Alex Deucher wrote this announcement at freedesktop.org:

It’s finally here! r6xx-r7xx-support branches of the drm and
xf86-video-radeonhd.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm/log/?h=r6xx-r7xx-support
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-radeonhd/log/?h=r6xx-r7xx-support

After months of hard work we are finally able to push out initial drm
and accel code for r6xx and r7xx chipsets. We couldn’t have done this
without a lot of hard work from a lot of people. …

They stress the fact, that this is on Open Source driver, whereas Nvidias vdpau isn’t. Mesa and DRM support is being developed right now and all is addressed basically to developers at the moment.

It’s sad and funny at the same time somehow, that we had to wait for HD hardware acceleration almost 3 years, after the first driver hit the Windows world. And now ATI and Nvidia almost at the same time started to support H.264 on hardware for Linux, too.
I’ll laugh my ass off, if Intel and VIA/S3 (chrome) announce in a few days also have something running on Linux.

I’d really like to know who in the world gave this deep kiss to our Sleeping Beauty – the H.264 hardware acceleration for Linux.

Or is it just, because they later want to say: “Hey, we support H.264 for Linux since 2008” 😉
(please see release date of this posting)