I seem to have fixed the issue.
During the update some package failed to configure properly, see log in the first post for detail.
The result was error msg popping out during boot about kernel modules not being loaded properly and resulting in hardware decoding not being used by the player.
I just logged in ssh and did the command:
sudo dpkg --configure --pending
Now no error message during boot and hardware decoding is enabled. (I only tested one h264 file for now, I’ll report if there are other problems)