I'm suprised this hasn't been posted here yet, considering its relevance to this project: https://bootlin.com/blog/allwinner-vpu-crowdfunding/
The engineers at Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) are running a crowdfunding campaign to complete the upstream kernel support for the CedarX Video Processing Unit (Allwinner hardware video decoder/encoder). If you're not familiar with Bootlin, they're the ones responsible for a lot of the other mainlining work that's already been done for Alwinner SoCs, so they have experience getting patches integrated upstream and with kernel development in general.
They've already reached their funding goal--which includes support for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 part 2/H.263, and MPEG-4 part 10/H.264/AVC decoding on the A20 SoC--but they have a few stretch goals that include support for newer Allwinner SoCs, HEVC/H.265 decoding, and H.264 encoding.
Anyways, if any of you want to help fund the development of Free Software, this looks like a pretty good opportunity to do so!
For more information, see the Kickstarter campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-support-in-the-of...