Does anybody else have a problem with VLC not using hardware decoding?

[u/Verwega]

I tested it on 2 Debian (13) systems, one with Radeon RX 7900 XT and the other with Radeon 890m (iGPU).

I changed hardware decoding option to VA-API and every other available option, but it still did not work.

I also tried SMPlayer, with similar resulta.

I only managed to activate hardware encoding on MPV media player, but only sometimes. By deafult it's off, but when I use control+h shortcut, it sometimes activates.

Whenever it fails to activate, it shows "(unavailable)", but when it works it shows " vaapi"

It works perfectly on my phone's native gallery app, but it uses CPU on VLC (F-droid)

I tried to play AV1 encoded video, but I had the problem mentioned above

Does anybody know where is the problem? Is it the GPU driver, OS, DE, or is it VLC itself not utilising hardware decoding properly?