There are so many options out there, it’s kind of dizzying.
I’m looking for a cheap solution that I could hook up to a TV and ethernet, so it could run a flavor of Linux (or BSD) and play videos at 1080p. Bonus points if it can handle 1080p@60 FPS. Other than that, it would be used for light web browsing.
I was looking at Raspberry Pi 4, but is there anything else you would suggest?
Just another thing to consider: the codec the video is encoded with matters, h.265 is gonna need a lot more beef than h.264 or mp4.
I am unsure if the GPU on RPi3 can handle 1080@60. It might become choppy or laggy. 720p is handled fine on it, though.
You also want to have hardware that you can run more than just one video on, because there is always extra workload going on.