I’m using an ASUS NUC 14 Essential Kit N355. It’s a bit more expensive than the Pi 5, but also more powerful (8 cores and decent GPU). There is also a more affordable N150 model. And even lower budget are the N150 mini PCs from Chinese manufacturers, but they often mess up things like cooling in a hardware revision (compared to the favorable review that you’d read).
And forgot to mention this before: Intel CPUs with built-in GPUs have very performant and energy efficient hardware video codecs, whereas the Raspberry Pi 5 is limited and lacks software support.
