> It would be an absolute game changer to be able to literally download hardware acceleration for a new video codec or encryption algorithm

That relies on "FPGAs everywhere", which is much further out than "GPUs everywhere".

I'm not sure where the state of the art is on this, but given the way that codecs work - bitstream splitting into tiles, each of which is numerically heavy but can be handled separately - how is development of hybrid codecs, where the GPU does the heavy lifting using its general purpose cores rather than fixed function decoder pipeline?