Board for HEVC 1080p with power over ethernet (PoE)?

    Hey there, I'm looking for recommendations on a board, these are my requirements:

    * very good support for HEVC / x265 decoding at 1080p30, 8 bit, high profile

    * power over ethernet support

    * passive cooling (no fan)

    * rock solid stable, preferably few/no binary blobs tied to old kernels etc

    * low cost, sub $50 if possible, the lower the better

    I get conflicting info over how well the Pi 3+ can handle HEVC at 1080p. I understand that it doesn't have native hardware decoding support but that some wonderful folks have done a lot of work offloading as much of the task as they can to the GPU. I need rock solid 1080p performance though for 8-bit material, I really don't want to see dropped frames other than maybe a few when the program starts.

    I'd love any suggestions. Wish the Odroid C2 did PoE.

    RPi3B+ HEVC support is very good up to 720p, but you will experience frame drops with some (possibly, most) 1080p @ 30fps content (1080p @ 24fps is usually handled pretty well). A small overclock may help (particularly SDRAM, which is the limiting factor with 30fps content) but unfortunately the RPi3B+ is already on the edge of what it's capable of with HEVC, so there's no guarantees with 1080p @ 30fps HEVC content.

    Edit: to clarify difference between 1080p@30 and 1080@24.