How to turn off ffmpeg hardware acceleration

Question

I have a video player. Written in C++ with Visual Studio, using the ffmpeg 3.2.2 libav libraries. I need to be able to programmatically turn off hardware acceleration of video decompression. I'm not finding much discussion on turning off hardware acceleration; the only info I found is here on StackOverflow: How to turn off Video Acceleration programatically But that solution looks global to the system, not just my application. Are there any ffmpeg flags or APIs that enable turning off hardware acceleration? VLC, which uses ffmpeg's libav libs, has an option to turn hardware acceleration off, so there much be some local-to-the-application method...