Wikipedia
VDPAU
VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) is a royalty-free API as well as its implementation as free and open-source library (libvdpau) distributed under the MIT License.
The VDPAU interface is to be implemented by device drivers, such as Nvidia GeForce driver, nouveau, amdgpu, to offer end-user software, such as VLC media player or GStreamer, a standardized access to available video decompression acceleration hardware in the form of ASIC blocks on GPU chips, such as PureVideo or Unified Video Decoder and make use of it.
VDPAU is targeted at Unix-like operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris).