VDPAU was originally designed by Nvidia for their PureVideo SIP block present on their GeForce 8 series and later GPUs. Which specific codecs of these that can be offloaded to the GPU depends on the generation version of the GPU hardware. Ĭurrently, the portions capable of being offloaded by VDPAU onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp), inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT), VLD (variable-length decoding) and deblocking for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1, WMV3/ WMV9 encoded videos. VDPAU allows video programs to access the specialized video decoding ASIC on the GPU to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing from the CPU to the GPU. VDPAU is targeted at Unix-like operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris). The VDPAU interface is to be implemented by device drivers, such as Nvidia GeForce driver, nouveau, amdgpu, to offer end-user software, such as VLC media player or GStreamer, a standardized access to available video decompression acceleration hardware in the form of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) blocks on graphics processing units (GPU), such as Nvidia's PureVideo or AMD's Unified Video Decoder and make use of it. Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix ( VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library ( libvdpau) distributed under the MIT License.

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