While Mesa Gallium3D drivers with capable GPUs have already supported accelerated AV1 video deocding, to date it's been limited to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). With newly-merged code for Mesa 24.1, the VDPAU state tracker can now also handle AV1 decoding with supported drivers/GPUs.

VA-API is widely supported by many modern Linux applications for video acceleration while VDPAU has been around for a while too as NVIDIA's original video decode path for their proprietary Linux driver. For software that may support VDPAU but not VA-API, the VDPAU state tracker has been extended to handle AV1 decode.

Chris Rankin in the merge request explained his motivation:

Add support for AV1 decoding.

My motivation here is realising that in Fedora 39, VLC no longer supports VA-API. Basically, FFMpeg is developing faster than VLC. And while the next major release of VLC will likely resolve the current problem, FFMpeg will likely have moved on by then too. IMO it is worth having VDPAU support available as a fall-back position for the more common codecs.

The code was merged today for Mesa 24.1 that will be out as stable in Q2.