actually via has had video accel for very long
Via has had video accel for very long and it is exactly of the kind which other vendors are coming around to settle upon - Full variable length decoding on-chip combined with mo-comp.
Starting from Apollo 266 all of their onboard videos support it and from 400 onwards (if memory serves me right) there is support for MPEG4. The latest ones support H264 as well. The usual complaint regarding it is deinterlacing. However, it is geared for proper DVD (and HD in the more recent ones) playback so it is not expected to need to do complex deinterlacing.
In my sitting room have a vintage 2003 Via at 600MHz (M6000 motherboard) with 256MB RAM (64 eaten by IGP) playing natively encoded DVD scaled to 1368x768 with flying colours. All of that while eating only 21W. Makes up for a great pacifier if the dinner is not on time and the 2 and a half year old brigand is hungry.
Via has failed to market it correctly, failed to advertise it and failed to package it after being there first 3-4 years before everyone else. It is truly the Daihatsu of the IT world :)
In any case as the ancient maxima says imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Intel is now imitating it by combining VLD and MO-COMP (so do others) and by putting AES on chip in the Xeons. 8 years after. And it costs several hundred pounds and eats 70W+. So much for "innovation".