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Comment by qmr | Hacker News Reader

That's all well and good, but let me know when I can buy a used $50 NUC or pi or such that has hw decoding of the same for my TV front ends.

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Intel has supported native hardware decoder for AV1 since Tiger Lake. That’s quite old. You could buy a used NUC with Tiger Lake. Even when new a NUC with 1115G4 or 1135G7 isn’t expensive. I found one with damaged WiFi for $20. https://www.ebay.com/itm/366767313411 You can buy it now.

I went to the link to buy a computer (a NUC11TNKi3) with this capability for $20, but all it would let me do is place a bid on it; I cannot buy it now.

It looks like they normally sell for around $200: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=NUC11TNKi3&LH_Sold=1

Cheaper to get a long fiber optic HDMI cable and connect your TV to your PC GPU. That's what I do. You get the best uncompressed video (typ 4K 120Hz or 8K 60Hz), zero lag so it can be used for stuff other than video, and don't have to maintain another box

I tried this and it was a huge pain. This works in a small place with a single TV and a single user, past that it's rough.

Running a hdmi cable through walls sucks, you're limited in tenancy (I can't game while wife watches the TV), controlling the pc remotely is annoying, most streaming apps don't support 4k on a pc (same problem with a nuc), I can go on.

This does not pass, or get anywhere close to passing the wife test imo.

Do you really care if your NUC uses an extra 2 watts to do software decoding?

Lots of media devices that don't have AV1 decoders tend to have issues decoding high resolution AV1 in real time so you either get pauses to buffer or dropped frames.

Yes but if it says "NUC" I doubt you'll have that issue.

I think you're seriously underestimating how expensive software decoding AV1 is!

I'm not even entirely sure whether a NUC could decode 4K AV1 in software in real-time.

I have a 13 year old CPU that needs 2 cores to decode 4K AV1. It's not that bad.

Maybe not 4K at 60fps but that's not a lot of content.

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