NVIDIA PureVideo

PureVideo is Nvidia's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia GPUs, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple video codec standards: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, and HEVC. PureVideo occupies a considerable amount of a GPU's die area and should not be confused with Nvidia NVENC.

The PureVideo SIP core needs to be supported by the device driver, which provides one or more interfaces such as VDPAU, VAAPI or DXVA. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, for example VLC media player or GStreamer, to access the PureVideo hardware and make use of it.

Nvidia's proprietary device driver is available for multiple operating systems and support for PureVideo has been added to it. Additionally, a free device driver is available, which also supports the PureVideo hardware.

Support for PureVideo has been available in Nvidia's proprietary driver version 180 since October 2008 through VDPAU. Since April 2013nouveau also supports PureVideo hardware and provides access to it through VDPAU and partly through XvMC.

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