Overview: NVIDIA
NVIDIA media technologies distinguish video decoding, video encoding and general GPU computation.
NVDEC and NVENC name different media-engine roles. CUDA supplies a programmable compute route, while CUVID appears in related decoding API terminology. The pages here connect those names to the operation being performed and the picture data exchanged with the rest of the pipeline.
NVIDIA NVDEC
NVDEC is NVIDIA’s dedicated video-decoding engine, exposed through a decoder API that reconstructs supported encoded streams and makes decoded surfaces available to later processing.NVIDIA NVENC
NVENC is NVIDIA’s dedicated video-encoding engine, creating a supported compressed representation from prepared input pictures through its encoder API.NVIDIA CUDA
CUDA provides NVIDIA GPU compute and device-memory interfaces used for programmable picture processing and interoperability around dedicated video engines.NVDEC and CUVID API names
NVDEC names NVIDIA’s decoding engine while CUVID and NVDECODE names persist in software interfaces, library symbols and media-program wrappers that reach its supported decode paths.