I believe this it is due to licensing issues with shipping code that functions as an MPEG decoder. If you are interested in developing video applications using CUDA, please contact NVIDIA developer relations.
I’m also working on a video application, but didn’t start looking at CUDA until Toolkit/SDK 2.1, so never saw the nvcuvid library. Is there a listing of what it includes so that I can see if it’s worth contacting developer relations about getting access to it?
It basically lets you decode MPEG1/2 and H.264 video streams (using the VP2 hardware) and then process the resulting images using CUDA. It’s currently only supported on Windows XP and Vista.