Briefly, this is the VDPAU driver with VA-API/OpenGL backend. There are applications exists that can use VDPAU. Amongst them are Adobe Flash Player and Mplayer. They both can use VDPAU, but since there is no VDPAU available on Intel chips, they fall back to different drawing techniques. And while Mplayer can use XVideo extension to offload scaling to GPU, Flash Player can not and does all scaling in software. If there was VDPAU available, CPU usage could be significantly lower. VDPAU is not vendor-locked technology. Even official documentation mentions possibility of other drivers. They should be named as libvdpau_drivername.so.1 and placed where linker could find them. /usr/lib usually works fine. Which driver to use is determined by asking X server about current driver name or by using VDPAU_DRIVER environment variable. Here is one. Named libvdpau_va_gl.so.1, it uses OpenGL under the hood to accelerate drawing and scaling and VA-API (if available) to accelerate video decoding. For now VA-API is available on some Intel chips, and on some AMD video adapters with help of xvba-va-driver. OpenGL is available, you know, on systems with OpenGL available. After installation, it may be necessary to edit /etc/profile.d/vdpau.{sh,csh} to select a backend by uncommenting the appropriate VDPAU_DRIVER.