Video Acceleration API (VA API) is a royalty-free API as well as its implementation as free and open-source library (libVA) distributed under the MIT License.The VA API interface is to be implemented by device drivers to offer end-user software, such as VLC media player or GStreamer, access to available video acceleration hardware, such a PureVideo (through the libva-vdpau driver, which implements VA API in terms of VDPAU) or Unified Video Decoder and make use of it.The cross-platform (*nix so far) API enables and provides access to hardware-accelerated video processing, using hardware like for example graphics processing units (GPU) to accelerate video processing in order to offload the central processing unit (CPU) to decode and encode compressed digital video.VA API video decode/encode interface is platform and window system independent but is today primarily targeted at Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) in X Window System on Unix-like operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris), and Android, however it can potentially also be used with direct framebuffer and graphics sub-systems for video output.