[bonyt]

It's still useful for some applications. ATSC digital broadcasts in the U.S., for example, are in MPEG-2, as are the signals provided by many cable companies. I have an HDHomeRun Prime, and purchased the MPEG-2 HW Decoder license[1] for my Raspberry Pi 3 to make things a bit smoother.

[1]: http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

[Narishma]

Isn't the Raspberry Pi 3 powerful enough to do MPEG-2 decoding in software?

[dsr_]

Not if you want it to do anything else at the same time, and not if you need de-interlacing of the 1080i streams that half the over-the-air channels use.

[djsumdog]

Since they want to do hardware x264, are there any patent issues they'll have to deal with, or will that be included in the cost? I didn't see anything listed on the Kickstarter page.

[mastax]

Looks like Bootlin is located in France. France doesn't recognize software patents (as I understand it), which is why VLC can exist.

(Though I noticed on VLC's website that the EC could try to change that: https://www.videolan.org/press/patents.html)

[gsnedders]

DVDs, too, are almost all MPEG-2.