Comment by calafrax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calafrax | Hacker News Reader

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I like mini-itx systems and have a very nice mini-itx htpc myself but it is not because I need an Intel CPU.

UHD blows out any dual-core CPU (maybe quad can do it?) so dedicated hardware is an absolute necessity for that.

Even if you could decode video in software the power efficiency is so much worse than using dedicated hardware that it is really impractical.

I am using the video decoder on an Nvidia GTX-1060 and I am paying a huge price for a lot of wasted hardware in order to get access to that. And I am forced to use Windows anyway since I can't get Kodi to sync the refresh rate properly on Linux and a couple hours of wasted time trying to fix that is the limit of my patience.

IMO fixed hardware based on ARM (which costs about $100 vs $1000+) is obviously the better solution for price/performance on video.

What I am paying for is the aesthetic (HDPLEX HD5 case) and the enjoyment of having something I built myself, not technical superiority.

Video decoding is sequential, so adding more cores is not going to help.

It might actually be easier for you to get a dual core which can decode everything you want. Any high-clocked desktop Core i3 should easily handle any reasonable bitrate 4k video in any codec on the market. If it doesn't then there's something very wrong with your video decoder software.

It all depends on how you define "reasonable" bitrate. I am running ~40mbit h265 videos. I have a Pentium G4400 which can only do a few frames per second and I have tested on an i5 also and it still drops frames on high complexity scenes.

More to the point, why would I want to burn 100 watts decoding this in software when I can do it in single digits with fixed function hardware?

[edit]

You may be talking about videos that can use Intel's own fixed function video decoding hardware, which will work just fine on an i3. I am talking about 10bit h265 which Intel Skylake didn't support when I was building my system. Kaby Lake supports it now so if you are building a new system Kaby Lake would be the way to go.

Thought you were referring to h.264 and VP9/10 video, which are still a lot more common, even for UHD (in my experience). h.265 software decoders are still immature, in part because of the lack of content.

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