Video Acceleration API

Video Acceleration API (vaAPI) is a software interface specification which provides access to graphics hardware (GPU) acceleration for digital video. Accelerated processing includes video decoding, decompression, proc-amp, deinterlacing, motion compensation, scaling, blending, and compositing. A reference interface is provided by means of "libVA".

See also

• X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC)

Sources

"This API is intended to provide an interface between a video decode application (client) and a hardware decode accelerator (server), to off-load video decode operations from the host to the hardware accelerator at various entry-points." http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi

"A new video acceleration API is being developed, in an effort lead by Intel. This new API supports more complete offload (VLD) as well as iDCT+MC, and can support acceleration of MPEG4, H.264, VC-1, as well as MPEG2." http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/XvMC

"Extending XvMC was considered, but due to its original design for MPEG-2 MoComp only, it made more sense to design an interface from scratch that can fully expose the video decode capabilities in today's GPUs." http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware_Accelerated_Video_Decoding

The "VA API" and "libVA" can also be read about here: "The end user impact is improved performance of H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video playback with media players that use the new API compared to playback using a pure software implementation." https://wiki.ubuntu.com/mobile-hw-decode