VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is an open source library (libvdpau) and API originally designed by Nvidia for its GeForce 8 series and later GPU hardware, targeted at the X Window System on Unix-Like operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris). This VDPAU API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing to the GPU video-hardware.
Currently, 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. Which specific codecs of these that can be offloaded to the GPU depends on the generation version of the GPU hardware; specifically, to also decode MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), Xvid/OpenDivX (DivX 4), and DivX 5 formats, a GeForce 200M (2xxM) Series (the eleventh generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units) or newer GPU hardware is required.
VDPAU can be described as the X Window System equivalent of the Microsoft's DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) API for Windows.
Read more about VDPAU: Device Drivers and Video Controllers Implementing VDPAU, Software That Uses VDPAU, Libvdpau Standalone VDPAU Library, See Also