NVIDIA has been shifting their focus from VDPAU for GPU-accelerated video decoding to instead the NVIDIA Video Codec SDK that offers NVENC for encoding and NVDEC for video decoding. FFmpeg has landed initial NVDEC support.

NVIDIA has been transitioning their focus with Linux video acceleration from using the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) to the cross-platform, CUDA-based Video Codec SDK with NVENC/NVDEC while VDPAU continues to be supported for the time being.

FFmpeg has obviously supported VDPAU for a number of years now while landing this week into Git is initial NVDEC decoding of H.264. Living now within Git is the NVDEC-accelerated H.264 hardware-accelerated decoding. This support first appeared in Libav. At the moment only H.264 is implemented. This comes a few months after GStreamer picked up NVDEC support.

This addition will be found in FFmpeg 3.5 along with Intel QSV MJPEG encoding, aptX encoding/decoding, a TiVo TY/TY+ demuxer, and other changes baking.