"Gwenole Beauchesne is the developer working for
Splitted Desktop Systems who had written the VA-API patches back in
December for MPlayer and FFmpeg. However, his latest Video
Acceleration API hacking has led him to write a VDPAU back-end for
VA-API. By allowing VDPAU (the Video Decode and Presentation API
for Unix) to operate underneath VA-API, it's now possible for video
playback to be accelerated using VA-API on NVIDIA hardware. NVIDIA
had introduced VDPAU to their drivers last year in order to bring
PureVideo features to Linux. Our VDPAU benchmarks very pleasing
with the ability to use a $20 CPU and $30 GPU to play HD videos
with ease. This NVIDIA API has already worked its way into the code
for MPlayer, FFmpeg, MythTV, Xine, and support for VLC is
underway."