Is there any guidance on which option should be used?
I was looking at my Tivo Stream 4k, and comparing the two. When using software, picture seemed to be smoother, especially when watching the crawl on news programs. On hardware decoding the crawl looked somewhat choppy and blurry.
Good question, I was wondering about that too. But I also was under the impression that those settings only referred to transcoding remote and web-based playback, and not local clients. Is that not true?
No it is not remote based it is Client Based. On my FireTVCube software does not decode ATSC 3.0.. But the software OPTION is the best for regular OTA.... So I use software and have the ASTC 3.0 tuner disabled until this is addressed.
Oh, OK, I thought this question was referring to the settings on the Server. I don't believe I have such settings on my AppleTV clients.
That is not what the OP is talking about on the Android Clients you have the option of hardware ... hybrid.. and software playback.
OK, got it, thanks for the explanation.
Hardware is typically better, however, some users have reported problems with hardware decoding with the T4KS. So many will set it to software. I noticed some choppiness as well on mine, I'm going to switch it to see if it makes a difference myself.