Shotcut 26.1 video editor introduces hardware video decoding, lowering CPU usage and improving preview performance across Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Shotcut, a popular open-source video editor, has released version 26.1, introducing hardware video decoding. The feature arrives after years of development work aimed at making it reliable across operating systems and GPU vendor APIs, and it is now available on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Hardware video decoding is enabled through Settings > Preview Scaling > Use Hardware Decoder and is turned on by default, except on Linux systems using NVIDIA GPUs.

On Linux, the implementation relies on VA-API, while Windows uses Media Foundation and macOS uses Video Toolbox. Keep in mind that the decoder only works with codecs supported by the underlying hardware and automatically falls back to software decoding when necessary.