I'd suggest a Core 2 duo overclocked to 2.4 to 3.0ghz for full bandwidth 1080p. Haali MKV encoded blu-ray "backup" will skip with cyberlink or coreavc in media portal (unless it doesnt listen to my merit changes). Media player classic played it fine without drops with coreavc codec at heavy cpu load. The same movie(not haali encoded) just played through cyberlink powerdvd ultra 7.3 deluxe with about 15% CPU load using purevideo HD. I will post in the main forum for help on this. Probably some settings or merits being ignored. I will try again with the cpu overclocked to 2.4ghz today to see if its acceptable. Best bet: get a e2140/e4300 and overclock the heck out of them, and you will have all bases covered in case the packaging limits. Software decoding works but requires ALOT of power. You can get away with alot less video card with software decoding Right now by using alot of CPU. CPU's are cheaper than video cards thankfully
Will post in main media portal forum when i overclock the 1.8 to 2.4ghz (e4300) to see if it works smoothly.
I've got an xbox1 that can play 920x540 h.264 encoded videos with the hardware scaler to 1080i.
I run media portal at 1920x1080@60hz SVGA to my westy 42". The reason to use media portal of course is for high definition, not a drop less
. anything less i might as well encode to the xbox1 and use xbmc. I am an xbmc-linux tester too but it far too "alpha" to be used compared to media portal.