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My serious hope for this is XBMC/Plex integrated and not some homegrown TV/Video playback mechanism (Or the APIs for me to do it).

XBMC has many of the problems of video/movie/TV playback and library support sorted and they can't hope to match it in the early days.

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Would codec patents would prevent them from bundling XBMC wholesale into SteamOS?

If it has a repo it could be easily installed via a meta package or a GUI element. Integration of 'apt' and the Steam Store would be cool.

I may be incorrect but I believe most codec patents revolve around the hardware implementations which would be covered through the hardware acceleration components that exist in most modern CPU/GPUs.

For video they can just offload decoding of common formats to the GPU, which most likely already has a decoder license. They should also be able to send raw DTS and AC3 over Toslink, S/PDIF, or HDMI.

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