Flash development tools allow the content creator to arbitrarily
create key frames. They support making every frame a key frame. They
also imply that actions on non-video layers will happen at a given
frame number for a video. It's tightly linked to everything else on
the stage.
OK, I get it :)
Wouldn't you at least say that key frames in a video sequence are sparse? and that in most heavy duty video clip key frames would be placed at beginning and end of the clip?
What sort of acceleration are you looking for? MPEG hardware decoders?
I could do that with the current media handlers. I could also do graphics with OpenGL. That's not enough though. Think volume embedded equipment - slow CPU, lots of special purpose hardware for multimedia. To make this work the CPU has to worry only about managing playback at a high level, reacting to user input, dispatching high level messages only, to black box entities below it. The key, as always, is exposing the parallelism inherent to the application. I can't have the main CPU involved in every little detail.