alt Hacker News> Even on Linux they would varely play an HD Youtube video if it weren't for the hardware acceleration.
Video decoding has always been a brutal workload, but that isn't Microsoft's fault. I had to replace my Thinkpad X220 with an X270 for no reason at all except h.265. It's a ULV i5 too, so the perf is almost identical to the old laptop's... until you watch video on it.
h.265 can get annoyingly heavy, but the better compression isn't coming from nowhere. But for less powerful machines, H.264 works just fine and works back far enough that even I got surprised. Even LGA 775 machines will do that just fine, and h.264 is more or less a constant lowest common denominator.
If it can't play a blu-ray off CPU, then it's either so old that DVDs were the media du jour, or it was never meant to be in a general-purpose computer. They'll do e-mail and Office in a pinch, and they'll play video within their limits, but venture outside for anything else, and it all comes crashing down.