InterVideo announced on Monday that its H.264 Codec now supports the new NVIDIA PureVideo H.264 decode acceleration available on GeForce 6 and 7 Series graphics processors.

H.264 is the digital video codec specified for the Blu-ray (BD) and High-definition DVD (HD DVD) formats. The H.264 specification, which is also known as the Advanced Video Codec (AVC) specification or MPEG 4-Part 10, delivers two to three times the compression efficiency of solutions such as the MPEG-2 standard, which is used in DVD video. H.264 also delivers high-definition video with six times the resolution of standard definition DVDs.

One of the key new features of InterVideo's H.264 codec technology is the ability to divide the decoding tasks among several hardware cores and hardware threads on both the CPU and the GPU.

NVIDIA ForceWare drivers featuring the NVIDIA PureVideo H.264 decode acceleration will be available in Q1'06.

InterVideo's H.264 codec, applications, sample application code and documentation are available for licensing to OEMs, system integrators and other third parties.