NVIDIA Releases Standalone VDPAU Library

While NVIDIA developed VDPAU (the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix, one awesome way of accelerating HD video playback with great results) for use in their proprietary graphics driver, the API itself is open and has been well adopted by multimedia applications.

VDPAU has worked out so well and has received critical mass that there is a VDPAU back-end for Intel's VA-API and work is underway on bringing VDPAU support directly to Intel's graphics driver. VDPAU may one day end up being used in other open-source drivers too. However, yesterday afternoon, NVIDIA made its first standalone release of the VDPAU library.

NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner announced on the X.Org mailing list the release of libvdpau 0.2. This open-source package contains a wrapper library as well as a VDPAU debugging library. Aaron also announced the release of vdpauinfo 0.6, which was a community-spawned CLI program for reading VDPAU information for a given piece of NVIDIA hardware.