"Well, today that closed-source driver has been released in beta form. This driver adds a new VDPAU API, which provides PureVideo-like features on Linux, adds in CUDA 2.1 support, new workstation performance optimizations, X Render improvements, and other improvements.
"The two leading X video output extensions for Linux are Xv (X-Video) and XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation), with the latter being an extension of X-Video that is able to offload some decoding of videos to the graphics processor. Right now XvMC is limited to MPEG-2 format, but there has been talk by Intel of extending XvMC to support more formats. NVIDIA has supported X-Video through their binary driver for quite some time and they even support XvMC on some graphics cards but that support was discontinued with the GeForce 8 series. On the AMD side they support X-Video / Textured Video, but not until recently did they support XvMC when they began work on their XvBA API (X-Video Bitstream Acceleration)."
