Vivia Nikolaidou authored Dec 17, 2015 and Sebastian Dröge committed Dec 18, 2015

When the mode of decklinkvideosink is set to "auto", the sink claims to
support the full set of caps that it can support for all modes. Then, every
time new caps are set, the sink will automatically find the correct mode for
these caps and set it.

Caveat: We have no way to know whether a specific mode will actually work for
your hardware. Therefore, if you try sending 4K video to a 1080 screen, it
will silently fail, we have no way to know that in advance. Manually setting
that mode at least gave the user a way to double-check what they are doing.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759600