NVIDIA released their new set of beta drivers yesterday, with a version 180.04. While going through the release notes, I found this line very interesting.

Added initial support for PureVideo-like features on Linux via the new VDPAU AP.

Now I don’t know what exactly they mean by “initial support” but nonetheless its a pretty good that they (finally) decided to add PureVideo support.

In case you’re wondering what PureVideois all about, PureVideo is a decoder which offloads decoding of MPEG2 & H.264 streams over to GPU, leaving the CPU free for other tasks. Read up on PureVideo more on the wiki.

Links to the drivers: x86 / x86-64

Here’s my how-to on installing the drivers.

Do note that the drivers are still BETA.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!