NVIDIA Lands AV1 VDPAU Hardware Acceleration In FFmpeg

NVIDIA has contributed support to the FFmpeg multimedia library for being able to take advantage of AV1 GPU-accelerated video decoding by way of the VDPAU API when using the latest-generation NVIDIA RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs.

NVIDIA has landed support for AV1 VDPAU hardware accelerated decode to the upstream FFmpeg project. This AV1 video decoding works in conjunction with libvdpau 1.5+ and using a Ampere or newer GPU that has the necessary hardware capabilities.

Since FFmpeg 4.4 there has been AV1 decode on NVIDIA GPUs via the NVDEC "NVIDIA Decode" interface that is part of their Video Codec SDK. FFmpeg also supports Intel QSV-accelerated decode, Windows DXVA2/D3D11VA AV1 decode, and CPU-based decoding via the DAV1D project. AV1 encode is also supported with FFmpeg by way of Intel's SVT-AV1. Now with FFmpeg Git, AV1 VDPAU decode is in place for those preferring VDPAU to the newer NVDEC. Outside of the NVIDIA space, this AV1 VDPAU exposure may help the Mesa Gallium3D drivers that support the VDPAU video acceleration state tracker as more GPUs begin having AV1 decode hardware blocks.

The AV1 VDPAU support was merged on Saturday to FFmpeg via this commit.