Hardware decoders will generate equivalent output to software decoders, but may use less power and CPU to do so. On PC-like platforms, video hardware is typically integrated into a GPU (from AMD, Intel or NVIDIA), while on mobile SoC-type platforms it is generally an independent IP core (many different vendors). Using such hardware allows some operations like decoding, encoding or filtering to be completed faster or using less of other resources (particularly CPU), but may give different or inferior results, or impose additional restrictions which are not present when using software only.
Many platforms offer access to dedicated hardware to perform a range of video-related tasks.
