Exploiting capabilities/limitations of available video hardware is nothing new in terms of multimedia programming. The old IBM VGA hardware had a 320×200 resolution mode that could display 256 unique colors. For years, that drove many graphic-heavy applications (notably games but also certain video applications such as FLIC files originally generated by Autodesk software). Back when I was hacking on the Sega Dreamcast I started to brainstorm about a vector quantizer video codec that could take advantage of the PowerVR 3D graphics hardware present in the console.
