>"2) It increases greatly the complexity of client software that has to implement both accelerated and unaccelerated decoding, leading to poorer software quality"
I happen to have my own product having just that - software and hw accelerated decoding. It plays videos in few resolutions and presence of HW acceleration allowed me to play 4K videos (first on the market in my segment) with close to 0% CPU consumption on low end PCs. Competitors at that stage would not even dream about offering 4K content.
As to "poorer software quality" - please do not play FUD. I just looked at the source code - the HW accelerated path (decodes from source to DirectX texture) added miniscule 1200 lines of code good chunk of which are headers / declarations. The software is being used by tens of thousands of clients and I have about zero reports where enabling HW decoding has lead to error.
I happen to have my own product having just that - software and hw accelerated decoding. It plays videos in few resolutions and presence of HW acceleration allowed me to play 4K videos (first on the market in my segment) with close to 0% CPU consumption on low end PCs. Competitors at that stage would not even dream about offering 4K content.
As to "poorer software quality" - please do not play FUD. I just looked at the source code - the HW accelerated path (decodes from source to DirectX texture) added miniscule 1200 lines of code good chunk of which are headers / declarations. The software is being used by tens of thousands of clients and I have about zero reports where enabling HW decoding has lead to error.