There are hardware video decodec in Omap2420,But we can't use it in OS2008 becuse of no drivers,It's pity.
though we can play many mp4 videos using Mplayer, it is software decodec ,the power consume is very large.
Support for OMAP2 devices (Nokia N800, N810) will not be officially provided in Maemo5. An invitation is extended to developers however, to build variants of Maemo 5 that would work with older devices.
But in the future ,is it possible to turn on hardware Video decodec for Maemo5?Why TI wouldn't like to supply the drivers for IVA,there is advantage for TI,I think.it can sell more processors.

I think there's many more people working on producing open source drivers for nVidia and ATI graphics cards on regular PCs. And even with that large effort, they've figured out very little of the hardware. So, I wouldn't hold your breath for fully featured graphics drivers for the N800/N810.

If the NIT has an untapped ability, I bet some clever person will figure out a way to connect to it. I haven't written a driver in years myself, but ... is there documentation available somewhere? Anybody got some URLs?

I thought the issue was that Nokia didn't want to pay for the license for the 3D part of the chip? Thus even if you had a driver it still wouldn't work since that feature is disabled.

No, if there was a driver someone would get it to work. Probably not going to be a driver though. This is probably the main reason Maemo5 will not be supported (lack of drivers for everything), because the other stuff could probably be worked around.

Well, we're confusing some issues here. First, we're not talking about the PowerVR, we're talking about the IVA. To be honest, I don't know of anybody that actually uses the thing (do the OMAP2 Symbian phones?), certainly nobody running Linux.

Second, the PowerVR comes with the OMAP2420. It's not a "pay the license or we burn out this part of the SoC". TI has already paid the license and the cost is included as part of the price of the SoC.

The situation we're actually in is: We have the hardware, but we don't have the drivers to use that hardware (for a variety of reasons). If we had the drivers, we could use the hardware.