Intel Celeron J3455 or Intel Core i5 7260u for Libreelec HTPC setups?

    I want to have Libreelec HTPC for just watching local 1080p videos from USB hard drive, not for steaming from plex server. Either H.264 and H.265. I want the ones that consumes less energy consumption just to watching movies. When I found the deals of intel NUC on the internet, I found the ones with Intel Celeron J3455 was cheaper than the one with Intel Core i5 7260u, but it seems that Intel Core i5 7260u was more powerful than Intel Celeron J3455.

    Do I need to spend extra to get Intel NUC with Intel Core i5 7260u or just spend less money and get Intel NUC with Intel Celeron J3455? I'm not sure if Intel Celeron J3455 supports H.265 encoding hardware or software based. Anyone suggestions?

    I'd vote for the Pi5 and will be getting one myself soon as they're available towards end of this month. If you're looking for a dual purpose system for your HTPC you might also consider and Intel I3 system with plenty of horsepower for LE and pretty much trouble free operation. Likely gonna put the price tag around four to five hundred but will serve ya well for a long time. Runs win10 or 11 on a separate SSD when I'm not running LE so a like a 2fur. Kinda depends on your budget.

    We recently bought a cheap GMKtec NucBox G3 with an Intel N100 from Amazon, ($123 US). I used Sky42 Nexus (Libreelec 11) file for installation. So far everything, including 4k has played ok, but I did not and do not plan on testing every type of file. I whitelisted everything because our Sony XR75X90CL does really good upscaling, so I can not say how well it upscaled.

    The only problem we have is with the Digital Clock Screensaver, I can not change the colors, it gives an error with the color picker helper script. The addon problem may be related to me copying the files from our Chromebook 3.

    I have no idea how long this mini computer will hold up but so far I am really happy with the set up. I like it better than our Chromebox 3, Rpi4, Wetec Play 2 and others we no longer use. We use a shared database so I have no idea how well it will do with a large video collection etc.

    I have a NUC6CAYS which has a J3455, it was like $35 from ebay, it has built in 32GB EMMC that I run libreelec on and it happily streams 4k hevc/h265 hdr rips, the biggest I've tried is 135GB and it was fine (you will most likely need to update the hdmi firmware in windows). The inbuilt IR works with my RC6 media remote too and I got a barrel to USB C adapter to power it (I have two but one didn't have a PSU).