[falc410]

Currently I'm using an AMD E-350 with Openelec and Ace Skin. The CPU is a little slow, to navigating through my ~700 Movies is a little slow. Also the CPU can't play Hi10p @ 1080p without stuttering (Evangelion 3.0 is a good example). Hi10p @ 720p usually works fine.

So I'm thinking about upgrading. I had hoped for an AMD Kabini but apparently those are not for sale and only come with pre-build options. The Intel NUC would be reasonable, but apparently there are still a lot of issues currently. So I was thinking about getting an ITX Haswell Board and built it myself.

The cheapest Haswell I can find is the Celeron G1820T (with a TDP of only 35W). Would this CPU be strong enough already, or do I need something bigger?

[DrDaxxy]

I don't know if Celerons are strong enough, but my i3-4130T (also 35W TDP, bottom of the Haswell i3s) plays 1080p in software just fine (including 10-bit deep colour).

[falc410]

Thanks for the answer. I was expecting that the i3 was powerful enough, but it costs like 100€ compared to 35€ for the Celeron or even 50€ for a G3220T. I was hoping for a cheaper solution. The i3 is probably overkill. If you have time, can you check CPU utilization during Hi10p playback? I think you just need to press 'o' during playback.

[DrDaxxy]

Oh, nevermind, the file I tried was 720p actually. Have yet to try 1080p then. Sorry :/

That said, it does render 8-bit colour 1080p fine without hardware acceleration. I don't know how much more resource intensive Hi10p is.

I wouldn't read too much into CPU usage personally. Anyway, with all hyperthreads locked to the maximum clockrate (2.9 GHz) and hardware decoding disabled, peak CPU usage on a 1080p Bluray image is about 70%, and about 40% on a 720p Hi10p video. It's a bit hard to read since (on my Linux system, at least) the workload is constantly being shifted between the hyperthreads.

Yes, you can probably do with less than i3. The point I was trying to make is that even a bottom-of-the-barrel Haswell i3 is strong enough, you definitely don't need to go higher than that

Edit: Just tested 1080p hi10p. Plays without problems, CPU usage about the same as on the BD image.
I've also played this video fine on an E6750 that's close to 7 years old.