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, HEVC, and AV1.
The PureVideo SIP core needs to be supported by the device driver, which provides one or more interfaces such as NVDEC, 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.
[2] Since April 2013[citation needed] nouveau also supports PureVideo hardware and provides access to it through VDPAU and partly through XvMC.
[citation needed] PureVideo HD (see "naming confusions" below) is a label which identifies Nvidia graphics boards certified for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc playback, to comply with the requirements for playing Blu-ray/HD DVDs on PC: The original PureVideo engine was introduced with the GeForce 6 series.
Based on the GeForce FX's video-engine (VPE), PureVideo re-used the MPEG-1/MPEG-2 decoding pipeline, and improved the quality of deinterlacing and overlay-resizing.
Nvidia's press material cited hardware acceleration for VC-1 and H.264 video, but these features were not present at launch.
VPE (and PureVideo) offloads the MPEG-2 pipeline starting from the inverse discrete cosine transform leaving the CPU to perform the initial run-length decoding, variable-length decoding, and inverse quantization;[4] whereas first-generation PureVideo offered limited VC-1 assistance (motion compensation and post processing).
VC-1 acceleration was also improved, with PureVideo HD now able to offload more of VC-1-decoding pipeline's backend (inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT) and motion compensation stages).
This is the earliest generation that Adobe Flash Player supports for hardware acceleration of H.264 video on Windows.
[9] The H.264-decoder no longer suffers the framesize restrictions of VP3, and adds hardware-acceleration for MVC, a H.264 extension used on 3D Blu-ray discs.
[11] Previous Maxwell GPUs implemented HEVC playback using a hybrid decoding solution, which involved both the host-CPU and the GPU's GPGPU array.
Previous Maxwell GM200/GM204 GPUs implemented HEVC playback using a hybrid decoding solution, which involved both the host-CPU and the GPU's GPGPU array.
Nvidia claims that all GPUs carrying the PureVideo HD label fully support Blu-ray/HD DVD playback with the proper system components.
For H.264/AVC content, VP1 offers markedly inferior acceleration compared to newer GPUs, placing a much greater burden on the host CPU.
Complete acceleration means that the GPU performs all of VLD, IDCT, motion compensation and deblocking.