> Switching to hardware decoding is likely to slow down your pipeline.

If thats your experience, then something is off with your setup.

Hardware decoding on a modern computer might seem equally fast as software until you look at power usage where hw decode is a hard win. Even so, the resources used to decode modern high end codecs like x265 or av1 will be major and hard to miss.

but anyway discussed are encoding &decoding.

And video encoding goes from like 3 fps in software to 100s of fps in hardware, making it possible at all with any resolution and quality to speak of.

You need encoding to stream your video, like in a video meeting.