Khronos Group Finalizes Vulkan Video API 1.0, Intros H.264 & H.265 Decode

The Khronos Group, an industry consortium devoted to the creation of open standard application programming interfaces, has recently finalized Vulkan Video API 1.0, bringing improved optimizations and support for two popular video codecs — H.264 and H.265.

Vulkan is an open standard for graphics and compute programming across multiple operating systems, and the Video API gives applications the ability to implement hardware-accelerated video decoding, encoding and playback capabilities on a range of different platforms. Other APIs, such as DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) and Media Foundation Transforms (MFT), exist that offer similar functionality with limited cross-platform capabilities. Vulkan Video API is designed to work across all operating systems, while allowing developers to optimize their use of hardware resources.

The release of Vulkan Video API 1.0 marks a major milestone for the consortium as it continues to expand its offering to include new capabilities for developers. With its release, Vulkan Video API now supports both H.264 and H.265, two of the most popular video codecs. H.264 is the current leader in video compression, offering excellent quality at low bitrates. H.265, meanwhile, offers the same video quality as H.264 but with a much lower bitrate, which means smaller file sizes.

Khronos Group believes that the addition of video codec support to Vulkan Video API will bring improved performance and enhanced capabilities for developers. With hardware-accelerated decoding, developers can convert videos to formats optimized for specific hardware by leveraging the capabilities offered by Vulkan Video API. It also allows developers to implement various video effects, such as color correction and image stabilization, without having to resort to software-level approaches.

Ultimately, the combination of Vulkan Video API support and the addition of H.264 and H.265 codecs marks an important milestone for the Khronos Group. As it continues to expand its offering and offerings, developers will be able to take advantage of increased performance and capabilities when developing their applications using Vulkan. With the recent release of Vulkan Video API 1.0, developers interested in leveraging these new features should begin exploring the new API today.