FFmpeg Expands Its NVDEC CUDA-Accelerated Video Decoding

A few days back I wrote about FFmpeg picking up NVDEC-accelerated H.264 video decoding and since then more FFmpeg improvements have landed.

As mentioned in the earlier article, NVDEC is the newer NVIDIA video decoding interface that is succeeding their Linux-specific VDPAU in favor of the cross-platform, CUDA-based NVIDIA Video Codec SDK. There's also NVENC on the video encode side, while the recent FFmpeg work has been focused on the NVDEC GPU-based video decoding.

FFmpeg continues to maintain its VDPAU-based video decoding for existing NVIDIA GPUs, but as NVIDIA transitions to NVENC/NVDEC, FFmpeg is getting their support in order. After writing about the H.264 support a few days ago, VP9 and H.265/HEVC are also now supported via this multimedia library's NVDEC implementation.

The VP9 hardware acceleration landed just hours ago and for supporting this additional video format was about 200 lines of code. A separate commit has also added FFmpeg NVDEC support for 12-bit formats. There's also been a few other NVDEC updates in the FFmpeg code as well.

Look for this work to materialize in the upcoming FFmpeg 3.5 release.