Just remembered one other aspect of my conversation with Real. Unfortunately I'm not at my computer, so I can't bring it up in IRC.
There was mention of an exception being made to some of their standard policies in regards to GPL licensing of codecs for the XO / OLPC laptop. So, it might benefit someone to look around in the source for that, since it's a semi-low power system, and see which of their A/V codecs may have new licenses there, and if so, if they're written in such a way that we can use them.