XBMC Receives Mainline Support For VDPAU

While AMD continues to sit on the sidelines of Linux video playback as they have yet to release the needed information to expose their X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA) interface, NVIDIA's video API continues being adopted by various open-source multimedia projects. NVIDIA engineers working on the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix had only provided official patches for FFmpeg and MPlayer while the open-source community has stepped up and provided the support in other software applications (such as MythTV, Xine, and VLC).

Earlier this month we shared that the XBMC (formerly known as X-Box Media Center) project was working on VDPAU support in a separate branch of this multi-media program that's also used by Boxee. Yesterday afternoon this branch was merged back into XBMC, thereby now providing an "out of the box" VDPAU experience for this popular program.

The commit that introduced this mainline support can be found on the XBMC Trac, but be forewarned the page is rather long as the entire commit is displayed, which may cause some problems for a few web-browsers.

What's next for VDPAU? When will XvBA get released? Tell us your thoughts in the forums.