Mailing the story:

The open-source version of Microsoft's Silverlight is adopting hardware-based decoding for video, a move that will boost multimedia on Linux devices. Moonlight is adding support for Nvidia cards to offload the work of H.264 and VC1 decoding from the software player to the actual hardware. Nvidia features the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) so that the video card - not the software player - does the decoding. It's a small but significant development.