Hello Mark,
1) I think the "reference" here would be the AM335x TRM. It can be downloaded from here: http://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/spruh73.
2) Everything is in StarterWare.
3) There is going to be quite a lot between StarterWare and a video player. Because of the complexity of a true video player, we don't have resources that discuss this as this delves more into the section of general program development as opposed to something specific to this chipset or any of our chipsets. At the core of any video player, there will be a receiving mechanism (USB, Ethernet, parallel) which is handled by the device abstraction. However, the handling of the stream would have to be defined by the application. There would also need to be a frame buffer, possibly two or more, to store lines until they frame is complete, and lastly, there would need to be a mechanism to output the frame buffers to the screen. This would be another components that handles the line by line output of an entire frame via the LCD output device abstraction.
That's only a basic setup. This doesn't include any decompression of the stream and it assumes that it is in the exact resolution that the SW is designed for. That would be handled in SW also.