Finally, a pi good for 4K video! (Apparently Raspberry Pi 4 could as well, but I am assuming this is an improvement. I still have a couple of Raspberry Pi 3’s.)
It doesn’t have h.264 hardware decoding though, so ironically 4k HEVC/h.265 will probably play just fine but 1080p h.264 might struggle depending on your cooling solution.
The folks at Libreelec say it can software decode 4K h264 smoothly
I wonder if it’ll be powerful enough to run a Jellyfin server and actually handle some transcoding now
Are you sure they said it’ll decode 4k h264 smoothly? I’m seeing them saying 1080p is good, but not 4k.
Here’s a quote from the article you linked, emphasis mine:
RPi5 can software decode AV1, H264, VC1, VP9, and more at 1080p with ease. In our testing with YouTube and inputstream.adaptive a surprising amount of 4K media also plays.
Note that it’s unclear from this quote what Codec the Youtube stream was using, but remember that Youtube is quite low bitrate even at 4k. The implication here is that 1080p h264 is good and low bitrate 4k stuff might be okay, but it will struggle beyond that. Keep in mind that it’s not any worse than RPi 4 in that area, but I don’t think it’s going to be much better either.
That seems to work for my needs. The performance improvements according to this video seems promising: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9hYfQ7bRgZg
Then again, after learning about the crappy things the Raspberry Pi Foundation has done, I’m probably better off getting a used Lenovo ThinkCentre or HP EliteDesk Mini (which I already have) for a much lower cost. I was just excited about Raspberry Pi’s finally being powerful enough to handle 4K, but that may be a stretch, too.
