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[pepar]

Just started looking at JRiver (and Kodi) as a replacement for Popcorn Hour "appliances" to stream 1080p/Lossless Dolby/DTS movies from a media server.  Also have hi-res multichannel FLAC and DSD files.  All to a quite capable pre/pro. And all via HDMI.

With my context being using a small appliance for this, the Raspberry Pi solution looked familiar.  Ditto some of the other small boxes.  But then I started reading about discrete GPUs and Red October High Quality and I am somewhat adrift on Understanding It All. I am a gamer and also work with tools that rip, demux and mux Blu-rays, usually with several concurrent instances. So I understand beastly CPUs and GPUs. 

I guess my question is, for simply streaming HD video with no scaling or transcoding, and passing through lossless audio codecs to my pre/pro - all over HDMI - is there ANY audio or video quality advantage of a discrete GPU (and a beefy CPU) over a small appliance-type solution?

Jeff