X-Video Bitstream Acceleration

X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA), designed by AMD Graphics for its Radeon GPU and APU, is an arbitrary extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System on Linux operating-systems. XvBA API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU video-hardware. Currently, the portions designed to be offloaded by XvBA onto the GPU are currently motion compensation (MC) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), and variable-length decoding (VLD) for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2, including Xvid, and older DivX and Nero Digital), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), WMV3, and VC-1 encoded video.

XvBA is a direct competitor to NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) and Intel's Video Acceleration API (VA API).

In November 2009 an XvBA backend for Video Acceleration API (VA API) was released, which means any software that supports VA API will also support XvBA.

On 24 February 2011, an official XvBA SDK (Software Development Kit) was publicly released alongside a suite of open source tools by AMD.

Device drivers
Each hardware video GPU capable of XvBA video acceleration requires a X11 software device driver to enable these features. Currently only AMD's ATI Radeon graphics cards hardware that have support for Unified Video Decoder version 2.0 or later (primarily the Radeon HD 4000 series or later) are supported by the proprietary ATI Catalyst device driver.

Software supporting XvBA natively

 * XBMC Media Center
 * OpenELEC
 * MPlayer can be compiled to support XvBA