CPU anything ranging from an i7-14700K to an i3-2100 (yes, Sandy Bridge). Seriously, decoding video has never been a significant workload for over a decade.
>4K h.265 / AV1 video on a couple of years old laptop dual-core CPU.
Kindly, why the hell would I even watch 4K video on a laptop? Y'all keep throwing out contrived situations like that, meanwhile I'll be a sane man living in reality and re-encode it (in software, finer tuning of parameters) in my spare time down to 1080p or 720p so I save myself precious disk space and CPU usage while travelling.
Because that's the file I have on hand. Why on earth would I re-encode it if I want to watch it once?
I also connect my laptop to my 32" 4K screen. There the battery life is not a consideration, but the spinning fan is.
> in my spare time down to 1080p or 720p so I save myself precious disk space and CPU usage while travelling.
Your use case might work for you, and that's fine, but you claim that software decoding is universally not a problem. But it is, if you don't limit yourself to 720p h.264 pre-encoded at home. Most people are not fine with having to do this and having to limit themselves to low resolutions / bad IQ.
How about if you have a 4K monitor plugged in? Or if your notebook display is itself 4K (which is a completely valid configuration nowadays)?
I have a pretty beefy laptop with an RTX 3080. I regularly watch BDRips that exceed 50+ Mbps, and software decoding even on my 8-core Intel Xeon will cause some stutters. Hardware decoding is just so much faster.
You're pretty vague so far, so it could be that you're watching a software decoded 360p h.264 video on a Threadripper, in that case I agree.
It will be a very different situation when you try to watch 4K h.265 / AV1 video on a couple of years old laptop dual-core CPU.