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.
