Patent ID: 6940912

Claim:
A computing system comprising: a media processing application; a media processing accelerator; and an operating system, executing on the computing system, including an application program interface (API) to facilitate communication between the media processing application and the media processing accelerator, wherein the API includes auto-negotiation data structure(s) and operational da a structure(s) to dynamically negotiate at least a set of media processing system cabilities and/or a split in media processing among system elements suitable to each of the media processing application and the media processing accelerator and to processing of received media content, respectively, the operational data structure(s) comprising; one or more residual difference data structures, generated by the API to pass residual difference information between the media processing application and the media processing accelerator for media processing; and one or more control command data structures, generated by the API to pass control commands between the media processing application and the media processing accelerator; wherein the residual difference data structures and the control command data structures are dynamically generated when the auto-negotiation data structures have negotiated a split in media processing between the media processing application and the media processing accelerator.