NVIDIA's VDPAU Picks Up HEVC 4:4:4 Support

While NVIDIA is no longer active promoting their Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix "VDPAU" in favor of the cross-platform, CUDA-focused Video Codec SDK with NVENC/NVDEC, the VDPAU library still sees some rare activity from time to time.

As the first commits since November, last week libvdpau added support for the HEVC 4:4:4 profile to the VDPAU API. This support for H.265 4:4:4 video decoding was added to the libvdpau API and presumably will be exposed by the NVIDIA proprietary driver shortly if it's not already in place with its own VDPAU library build.

H.265/HEVC 4:4:4 video decoding is supported by NVIDIA Turing GPUs and the functionality is already exposed through their newer NVDEC API. The VDPAU API is also implemented by the Gallium3D video acceleration state tracker, but I don't believe currently AMD GPUs support HEVC 4:4:4 decoding, though at least this API addition may be relevant for them in the future.