Compiling steps for Stretch should be similar to Jesse.
Hardware decoding is always prefer since it will use the GPU instead of the CPU. This will allow the Pi to run much cooler and provide more CPU power for non-graphics tasks. Hardware decoding supports less codecs than software decoding. If you enable hardware decoding and a video is selected with an unsupported codec it will try to use the hardware decoding, fail and instead use software decoding which may cause a slight delay. This is no big deal unless most of your videos are using unsupported codecs in which case most videos will have a delay.
You will find that the Pi's resources are very limited compared to what you're used to having on your Mac and PC. Keeping as many tasks offloaded from the CPU helps preserve it's power for tasks only it can preform.
Hardware decoding + properly encoded videos = the best solution for a low resource device like the Pi.
