A new video encoding/decoding API can replace AMD and Nvidia's encoders on all platforms, truly one API to rule them all
The Khronos Group is a collaboration between nearly 200 companies, working together to produce various APIs for computing. Its most famous software, such as OpenGL, WebGL, and Vulkan, are all about graphics but for the past few years the consortium has been working on doing the same for video. It's just announced that Vulkan Video, a low-level API for handling video streams, now fully supports the hardware acceleration of the H.264 and H.265 standards for decoding and encoding.
If you're wondering what on Earth an API is, think of it as a translation service. It acts as a middleman between a developer's software and the hardware's drivers, making it far easier to produce an application that makes full use of a device's features. For example, games are typically written in C# or C++ but the instructions in the code are written for whatever API is being used. That could be Direct3D or Vulkan when it comes to the graphics.
Where Direct3D is restricted to Windows-based PCs, Vulkan is available across a range of platforms, such as Linux, Android, MacOS, iOS, and so on. Anything written with Vulkan in mind will work just the same on any of those systems, provided the hardware properly supports Vulkan. However, there hasn't really been a comprehensive cross-platform API for handling video decompression and compression.
That was until the Khronos Group released Vulkan Video a few years ago but the initial version only offered decoding, and even then it wasn't a core feature of the API: It was supported through the use of extensions, which are essentially API-snippets that are proprietary to one vendor's hardware.
With this new release, decoding and encoding of the H.264 and H.265 video format standards are now a core part of
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