[fps-hero]

Absolutely. Software encoders are constantly pushing the envelope in terms of quality, and they have tuneable knobs to allow you to pick the speed vs quality trade off.

Hardware encoders are much more restrictive. They will target a maximum resolution and frame rate, realtime encoding a possibly low latency as requirement.

The standards define the bitstream, but is lots of scope for cheating to allow for simpler hardware implementation. You could skip motion prediction and use simple quantisation, it would just contribute to the residual entropy that needs to be encoded. Then, you can use inefficient implementations of the entropy encoders. The end result is something that can be interpreted as a valid bitstream but threw out all the algorithmic tricks to give you high quality compressed video.

I think specifically in terms of YouTube, it’s not a hardware encoding issue but it’s a purposeful optimisation for storage and bandwidth.