Alright, but still, all I was offering is advice
He of course does not have to follow my recommendations, they may very well be bad. IMO the only way he can compete in the payware world is to leverage GPU decoding. There are many big-name decoders, with big backing, so he needs to differentiate himself. Offering the _real_ fastest decoding is one way, and I don't think it's possible to do that without leveraging the GPU in some way. CPU fallback, sure, but GPU decoding must be implemented. He could even use libavcodec-MT for the CPU decoding (seems fairly safe legally), since it's LGPL, and contribute if he needs more speed - surely that would be faster than writing a CPU decoder from scratch?