How do Android app knows that the underlying hardware supports a certain hardware decoding accelaration?

I just bought a TV box powered by Android 2.3. The underlying hardware platform is centered on Telechip 8801, which bases on ARM Cortex A8 and supports hardware media codec. However, when I play some video on it,开发者_如何学C it is not so smooth. The problem is that the media player doesn't take advantages of the underlying hardware codec. So, my question is that how upper app framework or apps knows media acceleration features of hardware and how to make use of them. TKs.

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Apps wont know about the underlying HW. They just call some APIs which in turn call lower level drivers which actually have the responsibility of interacting with the HW. So the HW vendor( or the one who wrote the device driver ) of your TV Box should have implemented the media related drivers in such a way that it takes advantage of the HW accelerator. Android Framework has nothing to do with it!

Also, how are you sure that your Box is not utilizing the HW accelerator?