PureVideo is
Nvidia
Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
's hardware
SIP core that performs
video decoding
A video decoder is an electronic circuit, often contained within a single integrated circuit chip, that converts base-band analog video signals to digital video. Video decoders commonly allow programmable control over video characteristics such as ...
. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia
GPUs
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...
, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple
video codec
A video codec is software or Computer hardware, hardware that data compression, compresses and Uncompressed video, decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while ...
standards:
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods ...
,
VC-1
SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...
,
H.264
Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and d ...
,
HEVC
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In co ...
, and
AV1
AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 tha ...
. PureVideo occupies a considerable amount of a GPU's
die area and should not be confused with
Nvidia NVENC
NVENC (short for Nvidia Encoder) is a feature in Nvidia graphics cards that performs video encoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the CPU to a dedicated part of the GPU. It was introduced with the Kepler-based GeForce 600 series ...
. In addition to video decoding on chip, PureVideo offers features such as edge enhancement, noise reduction,
deinterlacing
Deinterlacing is the process of converting interlaced video into a non-interlaced or Progressive scan, progressive form. Interlaced video signals are commonly found in analog television, VHS, Laserdisc, digital television (HDTV) when in the 1080 ...
, dynamic contrast enhancement and color enhancement.
Operating system support
The PureVideo SIP core needs to be supported by the
device driver
In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...
, which provides one or more
interfaces
Interface or interfacing may refer to:
Academic journals
* ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society
* '' Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics''
* '' Inter ...
such as
NVDEC,
VDPAU
Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library () distributed under the MIT License. VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia.
Th ...
,
VAAPI or
DXVA
DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) is a Microsoft API specification for the Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 platforms that allows video decoding to be hardware-accelerated. The pipeline allows certain CPU-intensive operations such as iDCT, motion ...
. One of these interfaces is then used by end-user software, for example
VLC media player
VLC media player (previously the VideoLAN Client) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source, software portability, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media Server (computing), server developed by the Vide ...
or
GStreamer
GStreamer is a Pipeline (computing), pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one f ...
, to access the PureVideo hardware and make use of it.
Nvidia's