Still, isn't this bizarre? Over the last couple of decades using Windows and macOS across many machines, I've encountered one time I had to mess with settings like this. That's the time I temporarily disabled hw accel in chrome so I could screenshare and watch a show with someone.
Meanwhile on Linux you gotta configure every app one at a time because sane defaults and auto configuration weren't invented here.
In addition to what others have said, hardware decoding comes with other drawbacks. There’s occasionally decoding inaccuracies and there’s no support for most video filters (unless you’re using `auto-copy`)
Do you know if/why on apple silicon Macs there’s a difference between videotoolbox and videotoolbox-copy ? I thought the SoC memory is shared and that there wouldn’t be a need for copying data from VRAM to RAM.
If you autodetect hw accel, even the slowest underpowered gpu might get returned, which could result in worstened user experience compared to just using cpu.
