VDPAU 1.5 Video Decode Library Released With AV1 Support

With the NVIDIA 510 series Linux driver back in January NVIDIA added AV1 video decode support to their Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) driver. Now finally out is libvdpau 1.5 as the adjoining open-source VDPAU library update.

This is the first libvdpau release in nearly two years with the VDPAU library not seeing as much work by NVIDIA these days due to their focus on the more-modern and cross-platform NVENC/NVDEC interfaces. However, VDPAU continues to be supported by the NVIDIA proprietary driver for GPU-accelerated video decode and the Gallium3D video acceleration code within Mesa also allows VDPAU-based acceleration for those drivers.

The main addition with libvdpau 1.5 is now adding the API additions for AV1 video decoding with VDPAU. All the necessary interfaces are now in place for a driver to implement if wanting to expose AV1 GPU-accelerated decode such as NVIDIA is doing with their RTX 30 series graphics cards with the NVIDIA 510 series Linux driver and newer.

Besides the AV1 support, there is also now tracing support for VP9 and HEVC info, updates to the continuous integration (CI) infrastructure, and other small changes that accumulated since 2020. The libvdpau 1.5 release can be downloaded from FreeDesktop.org.