High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Video Acceleration API (VA API) is an open source software library ("libVA") and API specification. It enables and provides access to graphics hardware (GPU) acceleration for video processing. VA API is targeted at the X Window System on Unix-based operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris). Accelerated processing includes video decoding, video encoding, subpicture blending and rendering. The specification was originally designed by Intel for its GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) series of GPU hardware. However, the API is not limited to GPUs or Intel specific hardware, as other hardware and manufacturers can also freely use this API for hardware accelerated video decoding.