Just to spell out what this means to those who are unfamiliar: since software decoding involves general purpose software, decoders are available that can handle

Just to spell out what this means to those who are unfamiliar: since software decoding involves general purpose software, decoders are available that can handle mostly any valid h264 video file. On the other hand, hardware decoders are purpose built and frequently handle only a subset of valid files. For instance, a decoder might (1) only handle encoding profiles < 5, as used by Blu-ray, (2) only support the most common bit depth of 8, (3) only support 4:2:0 chroma subsampled video and not 4:4:4. And so on.