I have a 1080P TV in my living room, and I'd like to get something dirt cheap that can playback h.265 without stuttering to connect to it. I also have a mk808b plus android stick plugged in which in theory supports h.265, but the stuttering is just unbearable. Any ideas?
Edit: Doesn't have to be a PC, any hardware really..
any decent CPU should be able to handle decoding on it reasonably well i would assume.
Idk if C2D E8500 would be enough?
You're assuming wrong.
H.265 takes a lot of horsepower even for 1080p, nevermind 4k (and not even talking about 10bit either).
Testing stuff: http://jell.yfish.us/
If you have the Core 2 Duo lying around already, just getting a cheap Geforce 10 series or Radeon 400/500 series should do it. The RX550 is rather cheap.
Maybe also a Kabylake Pentium.
TV box with Android and hardware support for H.265 are pretty cheap. Or, if you want to go more DIY, you can buy a single compute board with H.265 hardware decoding and install Kodi on it.
My laptop's i5 3340M with HD4000 iGPU is handling h.265 hevc perfectly fine. No stutters what so ever. I don't see why I'd need a rx550 just to play a 1080p h.265 video. I might be wrong, if I am, do correct me.
Some iGPUs on the Intels apparently got patched up via driver updates to support h.265 hardware decoding even though it was initially not supported. It also depends on the bit depth apparently.
Depends on the specific model, some got support, some didn't. Kinda weird, because Intel still states they are unsupported...
Trying it out is probably the best you can do, the Jellyfish videos are widely regarded as a good test suite.
I would look at a compute stick from Intel or the Zotac alternative. There are not a lot of android box's that have the h.265 decoders in them and your I5 3340m while not a barn burner is still a fairly good mobile chip as opposed to the low end noname ARM based chips in most android box's.
Don't the S905X ARM boards do this rather effectively? I don't run HD or decode stuff like that, so I have no first hand experience. I follow some blogs on small devices, and I know you can find these processors in TV boxes for ~$35 with 1GB/8GB or ~45$ with 2GB/16GB, and upwards from there of course.
I vaguely remember seeing at least one post on here of someone using one of these boxes and no complaints, perhaps someone with first hand experience can chime in. Alternatively, the Odroid C2 also uses that processor and you could search for peoples experiences using that for video decoding. It is a Raspberry Pi-esque device and I think they have Android and Linux builds, which can also be used on some of those TV boxes with the same SoC.
You could also go x86. I'm pretty certain even Apollo Lake based systems can do what you need.
I think your cheapest option is a small embedded system like this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange-Pi-Plus-2-H3-Quad-Core-1-6GHZ-2GB-RAM-4K-Open-source-development-board/1553371_32516755321.html
This board has a hardware decoder for HEVC 4K so it should be fine(at least what they are claiming), it's a quad core with 2gb ram and a gigabit NIC. I'm currently playing with one for a work project we're doing. The only issue i'm having is I can't seem to find a working Kodi/OSMC build for it, I'm not sure if it's even supported, otherwise the hardware is very nice.
Hey it's me!
UPDATE TIME!
I finally found a solution that fixed my MK808B Plus Android stick!
You won't believe this it's: ... F*KING LINUX!
[LINUX CONFIRMED INTENSIFIES]
I installed LibreELEC on an SD card, slapped it in there, loaded the system and HOLY F*CK, IT'S F*KING GORGEOUS!
The h.265 hevc files run like F*KING butter! God bless the Linux community!
Posting this in case someone else accidentally stumbles on it!
If you see someone asking for a solution, link them to this thread!
An amd apu that is used is a possibility.