Vdpau

VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is an open source library (libvdpau) and API originally designed by NVIDIA for its GeForce 8 series and later GPU hardware,[2][3] targeted at the X Window System on Unix operating-systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris).[4][5][6] This VDPAU API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware.

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), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264 / DivX 6), VC-1, WMV3/WMV9, Xvid / OpenDivX (DivX 4), and DivX 5 encoded videos.[4] 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.[7]

VDPAU can be described as the X Window System equivalent of the Microsoft's DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) API for Windows.[4]