I'm absolutely extatic that the Panfrost team pulled through and gave us Mali Midgard/Bifrost owners (somewhat)working 3d accel. Now, only one more thing is needed for turning my chromebook into a usable media device...a working hardware video decoder. Fortunately one is being worked on right now (and has been since last year atleast.
I was browsing the code base for it (still in staging/media; it's called hantro) and noticed the developer has pushed a few commits upstream to linux-next showing the enablement of a few decoders (VP8 and h.264) for a few chipsets:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke ... dia/hantro
looking into their personal github, I noticed they have a patch to enable the decoder on a few more SoCs that we may see in the upcomming kernel releases. Clearly this is in early development, but buggy or not, it looks like we will soon (depending on if you build it yourself) have SOMETHING that's not a blob to decode video.