Codec Acceleration describes computer hardware that offloads the computationally intensive compression or decompression. This allows, for instance, a mobile phone to decode what would generally be a very difficult, and expensive video to decode it with no stuttering, and using less battery life than un-accelerated decoding would have taken, and similar acceleration is used on a broad variety of other appliances and computers for similar reasons. What could take a general purpose processor 100 Watts to decode on a general purpose processor, could take 10W on a general purpose GPU, and even less on a dedicated hardware CODEC.
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Video Codec Acceleration
Video codec acceleration is where video (usually including audio as well) encoding and decoding is accelerated in hardware.
Audio Codec Acceleration
Audio codec acceleration is where audio encoding and decoding is accelerated in hardware.