VDPAU

VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is a royalty-free API as well as its implementation as free and open-source library (libvdpau) distributed under the MIT License.

The VDPAU interface is to be implemented by device drivers to offer end-user software, such as VLC media player or GStreamer, access to available video acceleration hardware, such as PureVideo or Unified Video Decoder and make use of it.

VDPAU is targeted at Unix-like operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris).

Functional range of the interface

VDPAU allows video programs to access the PureVideo function blocks to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing.

Currently, the portions capable of being offloaded by VDPAU onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp), inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT), VLD (variable-length decoding) and deblocking for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1, WMV3/WMV9 encoded videos. Which specific codecs of these that can be offloaded to the GPU depends on the generation version of the GPU hardware; specifically, to also decode MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), Xvid/OpenDivX (DivX 4), and DivX 5 formats, a GeForce 200M (2xxM) Series (the eleventh generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units) or newer GPU hardware is required.