To me this is a no-brainer.
Why would they fund it? If they saw the potential benefits, they could probably open source their own closed source drivers and avoid this Kickstarter being needed, or at the very least provide documentation to speed this work along.
Even without getting lawyers involved, I don't see how they could do any of the above tasks for less than the price of this Kickstarter.
Couldn’t that path just be left without acceleration, being it’s a less complex codec to begin with, usage is not growing, and the data sources are likely smaller to begin with (no 4k for example)?
http://linux-sunxi.org/VE_Register_guide
the device is generally single-function for each codec, with the decoding pipeline implemented in actual hardware. Unless you were able to express your kernel as a data transform used in a common video codec and express your I/O data as pixels, you're unlikely to accelerate a general purpose task this way.
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/8118991/
You can see it's quite specific to the primitives the codec needs. If you want general purpose, we now have Vulkan for that.
(And this one is reasonably low-level. On some like the Raspberry Pi, you throw bitstream over the wall to a coprocessor which gives you YUV back)
