The VPU is getting there: http://free-electrons.com/blog/support-for-the-allwinner-vpu...

"Currently, the combination of the kernel driver and VA-API backend supports MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding only. There is for the moment no support for encoding, and no support for H264, though we believe support for both aspects can be added within the architecture of the existing driver and VA-API backend."