ARM asm for AV_RN*() ARMv6 and later support unaligned loads and stores for single word/halfword but not double/multiple. GCC is ignorant of this and will always use bytewise accesses for unaligned data. Casting to an int32_t pointer is dangerous since a load/store double or multiple instruction might be used (this happens with some code in FFmpeg). Implementing the AV_[RW]* macros with inline asm using only supported instructions gives fast and safe unaligned accesses. ARM RVCT does the right thing with generic code. This gives an overall speedup of up to 10%.