The Khronos Group is a collaboration between nearly 200 companies, working together to produce various APIs for computing. Its most famous software, such as OpenGL, WebGL, and Vulkan, are all about graphics but for the past few years the consortium has been working on doing the same for video. It's just announced that Vulkan Video, a low-level API for handling video streams, now fully supports the hardware acceleration of the H.264 and H.265 standards for decoding and encoding.
If you're wondering what on Earth an API is, think of it as a translation service. It acts as a middleman between a developer's software and the hardware's drivers, making it far easier to produce an application that makes full use of a device's features. For example, games are typically written in C# or C++ but the instructions in the code are written for whatever API is being used. That could be Direct3D or Vulkan when it comes to the graphics.
