When I was at SCaLE 11 conference a few years back I had the pleasure of learning about haiku from one of the creators. He was demoing "big buck bunny" in HD on some really tiny and underpowered hardware.
As a comparison the had builds with other operating systems and they could not compete, they ran very choppy, like 3 fps.
I suggest you try it out. It's refreshing to tinker with an OS that is so fundamentally different. When I went home I installed it on a few machines I had, which were collecting dust. Tinkering with haiku sort of reinvigorated my original wonder of computing from when I as a kid, for a couple months.
Later at the conference, I was helping at the Python booth, and I asked if haiku supported Python. The haiku guy was not sure but he got it to compile and run about 4 minutes later, and it worked!
You're missing the point entirely, it could be done in hardware (I'm sure they would be happy with a PR) - but Haiku can do stuff in software that other OSes simply can't; media is just one of the better demos. It follows very strongly from the BeOS demos from the mid 90s[1].
To me this sounds unlikely. The CPU will spend all its time in codec library code here so how much of a role will the OS get to play? More likely the difference is coming from some departure from fairness in how the software codec was compiled
As a comparison the had builds with other operating systems and they could not compete, they ran very choppy, like 3 fps.
I suggest you try it out. It's refreshing to tinker with an OS that is so fundamentally different. When I went home I installed it on a few machines I had, which were collecting dust. Tinkering with haiku sort of reinvigorated my original wonder of computing from when I as a kid, for a couple months.
Later at the conference, I was helping at the Python booth, and I asked if haiku supported Python. The haiku guy was not sure but he got it to compile and run about 4 minutes later, and it worked!