Creighton suggested I should try applying my GCD code to video. After a couple days of hacking, I think I've done just that.

 

To decode the video I'm using xine. libxine is a great library. It can decode just about any media format on the planet, including DVDs.

I was really surprised to see how fast xine can process frame data. As an initial test, I setup xine to give my app frame data each time a new frame is posted. I then upload the frame data to OpenGL with mipmaps (using gluBuild2DMipmaps). Any old frame texture data is deleted to avoid overflowing texture memory. Amazingly, my app runs at 50fps using this simple approach.

Developing a faster solution should be straight-forward. But, I'm not really motivated to do so since things are working so well already.

Oh ya, xine has a built in sound system, so I get sound in my app without writing any sound code!