Comment by HerbManic
12 hours ago
I ended up getting a second hand Optiplex Micro for this. Tiny unit, low power usable, never even heard the fan switch on. Even with the slow frequency (2ghz) the Intel media decoders are brilliant at handling this stuff.
Mine was built with a leftover ryzen 1500X, microatx motherboard and RAM that were effectively free, a geforce 1030, and a random cheap 256GB SSD I found on newegg (the video content lives elsewhere across the LAN). It continues to be capable of playing 2160p60 H.265/HEVC content so I don't see a cpu and motherboard upgrade any time in the next couple of years, unless very high bitrate AV1 encoded content suddenly becomes more popular.
That sounds like it should be good for many years to come. Maybe if there is an uptake in AV2 once that is out then issues will come up. I'm not a shill but the one thing Intel have done well with their ARC cards is the media decoder. If their GPU space doesn't work out at least they have that and that could be a decent upgrade path in future.
I've tested it with 'normal' bitrate 1080p and 4K AV1 content and it still keeps up, staying under 70% CPU usage on all four cores, all AV1 decode in VLC is done in software since the geforce 1030/1050/1070/1080 generation of cards obviously has no capability for AV1... We'll see how it goes in 3-4 years.