View source for Video Acceleration

Linux offers access to video accelerators through programs like [[mplayer]], VAAPI and vlc.

==X-Video==
Offloads 2D scaling and YUV colorspace conversions. Use <tt>xvinfo</tt> to determine Xv support:
<pre>X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
  Adaptor #0: "NV17 Video Texture"
    number of ports: 32
    port base: 313
    operations supported: PutImage 
    supported visuals:
      depth 24, visualID 0x21
      depth 24, visualID 0x24
      depth 24, visualID 0x25
      depth 24, visualID 0x26...</pre>
===XvMC===
MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 offloading (NVIDIA's closed driver only supports MPEG-2, prefering VDPAU) via motion compensation and iDCT offload. Extends the Xv extension, using XvPorts. The [http://www.xfree86.org/~mvojkovi/XvMC_API.txt 1.0 API specification] was introduced in 2000.
===VAAPI===
The Video Acceleration API, a vendor-independent replacement for XvMC. It has backends for both VDPAU and XvBA.
==VDPAU==
NVIDIA's proprietary [[Xorg hell|X.org]] video acceleration API, comparable to Microsoft's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration DXVA]. It is independent from [[CUDA]]. Builds atop NVIDIA's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo PureVideo]. On [[Debian]], I have to manually link libvdpau. From <tt>/usr/lib</tt>:
<pre>sudo ln -s vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so.260.19.29 libvdpau_nvidia.so
sudo ln -s vdpau/libvdpau_trace.so.260.19.29 libvdpau_trace.so</pre>

==XvBA==
ATI's answer to VDPAU, built atop ATI's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVD2 Unified Video Decoder].
==See Also==
* [[Xorg hell]] page
* "[http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Enable_XvMC_for_NVIDIA_video_cards Enable XvMC for NVIDIA]" at the ArchLinux wiki