It seams the first hardware capable of MPEG 2 and H.264 encoding and decoding at 1080p full HD resolution, will be from Toshiba, look here:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/04/08/tosh_samples_spursengine/
It says it does H264 decoding and *encoding* ? IMHO that means that this HW is very ahead of current technology or/and very expensive.
there's other bottleneck in Linux
- no any information about LInux drivers for this card, - the Linux VAAPI for hardware video acceleration is not finish yet - no any Linux software (ffmpeg and players) that can support hardware video decoding
Igor