> Most of the video you encode on a computer is actually all in software/CPU because the quality and efficiency is better.

I don't think that's true. I bought a Thinkpad laptop, installed Linux and one of my issues was that watching youtube video put CPU onto 60%+ load. The same with Macbook barely scratched CPU at all. I finally managed to solve this issue by installing Arch. When everything worked as necessary, CPU load was around 10%+ for the same video. I didn't try Windows but I'd expect that things on Windows would work well.

So most of the video for average user probably is hardware decoded.