Assembly has never been dead in the realm of multimedia processing, or for that matter, anywhere that you have to do an enormous amount of SIMD-able number crunching.

Find a video (en|de)coder without SIMD and you've found an unusable piece of software.

There's a reason that Intel focuses so much on SIMD instructions and arithmetic units with each new chip release: if not for SIMD or dedicated hardware, it would be physically impossible to decode 1080p video on almost any modern machine.