The comment to which you replied was about encoding, not decoding. There is no reason to do decoding in software, when hardware decoding is available. On the

The comment to which you replied was about encoding, not decoding. There is no reason to do decoding in software, when hardware decoding is available. On the other hand, choosing between hardware encoding and software encoding, depends on whether quality or speed is more important. For instance for a video conference hardware encoding is fine, but for encoding a movie whose original quality must be preserved as much as possible, software encoding is the right choice.