Fluendo's New Codecs Support VDPAU, VA-API

Fluendo, the company that sponsors the development of G-Streamer and also offers legal codecs at a nominal fee for different proprietary audio/video formats on Linux and other operating systems, has announced the release of a new codec pack. Codec Pack Release 11 from Fluendo offers a variety of improvements to existing codecs, a AC3 Dolby Digital audio decoder, and new hardware acceleration support.

Fluendo's Codec Pack 11 improves performance for the 32-bit version for WMV7 and WMV8 and fixes to improve the performance and reliability of MPEG2 video decoders. Perhaps most interesting though is that the Fluendo codecs now support VDPAU and VA-API.

VDPAU is NVIDIA's flagship video decoding API that's provided by their proprietary Linux graphics driver and will eventually be making its way to the Gallium3D architecture for other hardware (it is also reportedly found in the S3 Graphics driver). VDPAU allows HD video playback with very low-end CPU/GPU hardware and also works great on mobile NVIDIA platforms. The Video Acceleration API (VA-API) was founded by Intel but has become rather vendor neutral and it is supported by the Poulsbo driver and even can be utilized by NVIDIA hardware via a VDPAU back-end. VA-API is also the only way that AMD's XvBA (X-Video Bitstream Acceleration) is exposed on Linux.

Fluendo Codec Pack 11 with the VA-API and VDPAU acceleration support requires not only a supported graphics driver that implements either API, but also Totem 2.28 or newer and G-Streamer 0.10.26 or newer. There are also other video improvements coming to G-Streamer following a G-Streamer and Cairo hack-fest late last year.

Codec Pack Release 11 was announced today by Fluendo in a press release.