Comment 14 for bug 432172

Well, I don't think having multiple versions installed in parallel is a supported configuration, or even that useful?

Anyway, the rules are as follows, assuming I'm remembering correctly:

Open-source libvdpau.so* loads /usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_${driver}.so.1 (which is the defined canonical location now) and if that doesn't work, falls back to libvdpau_${driver}.so via ldconfig path. This fallback mechanism is because open-source libvdpau.so* needs to support both recent NVIDIA driver release (which place files into /usr/lib/vdpau) and older releases (which place files into /usr/lib).

The libvdpau.so* shipped with the NVIDIA binary driver only searches for libvdpau_${driver}.so (via ldconfig path) since the binary driver installer always installs the library, or a link to it, into /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so. Since /usr/lib may be named /usr/lib, /usr/lib32, /usr/lib64, ..., and the single binary we ship must work on all distros, it's simpler to rely on ldconfig path for our binary libvdpau.so*.

In simpler terms, what you propose sounds like it should work.