Video quality and hardware decoding

What decides the quality you see

The stream your source sends. The app plays it as received, decoding but never re-encoding, so it cannot make a stream sharper than the source made it, and it is never the reason a stream is 720p. The common broadcast codecs play: H.264, H.265, MPEG-2, and AV1 where the machine can decode it.

Hardware decoding

The graphics card decodes video when it supports the stream’s codec, and the processor takes over automatically when it does not. Nothing needs configuring: the fallback is the default behavior, not an error.

The setting, and when to touch it

Settings, under Playback, has a hardware acceleration switch with three positions: Auto, the default, lets the player decide; On forces the graphics card; Off forces the processor.

The one reason it exists: a small number of integrated GPUs produce flicker or corrupted frames when decoding in hardware. Off makes the processor do the work instead, which costs CPU but draws correct frames. Restart playback after changing it; a running stream keeps its old setting.

The switch governs live TV and multiview. Movies and episodes always use the automatic behavior.

If the picture looks wrong

Start from the picture is wrong, which walks the short path between a source problem, a decoding problem, and a display problem. Stutter and freezes are usually delivery rather than decoding: buffering or stuttering.