Laptop as Media Player

[VRavichandar]

Does your laptop support DTS HD pass through?

My answer is not related to Apple TV.

I play (mostly) downloaded content through my laptop. I use potplayer - it and other similar players (MPC-HC, VLC) have option to pass through audio to be decoded by AVR. Have played DTS-HD without any issues. Caveat: Your laptop should support HD Audio (laptop models 2014 and later definitely support HD audio).

 

[DB1989]

You can use your laptop by all means as long as it has an HDMI port. Does your laptop have one? Next you'll need a bare minimum of 1gb dedicated graphics card built in. More dedicated memory the better.

Get a Logitech k400 wireless keyboard and you're all set.

Follow the link posted above to setup Kodi. What would be your processing device, an avr?

MaSh

I don’t think 4k and dts hd decoding require a graphics card and newer generations of intel/amd processors should suffice unless you are getting an athlon or a celeron processor. This is because video decoding is performed mostly by the cpu with very little help from the gpu, at least in laptops.

For reference, My office laptop with a core i5 processor (2 cores 4 threads) with integrated onboard graphics (basically, the graphics controller is inbuilt in the cpu) and 4gb of ram ( of which 512 mb Is shared as vram so actual ram is even less and also, 512mb not dedicated vram<dedicated 1gb vram) with plays back 4k dolby atmos movies without any problems or frame drops whatsoever whereas my laptop with top of the line Core i7 processor (4cores and 8 threads), 8gb ram and Nvidia GTX950M with 2gb dedicated vram can’t.

the reason? The core i7 is gen4 whereas the core i5 is gen6. Intel added a feature (i think its called quicksync video) which enables these newer generation cpus to decode 4k efficiently and effectively despite in raw number crunching tasks, my core i7 easily outperforms the core i5.