Transcoding anything >720p is painful.
I run ancient hardware for desktop/laptop >10yrs old apple stuff running linux. I consume media mainly via rpi4 or android.
What’s a minimum level system capable of trans-coding 4k video to x265 in at the very least real time? Is there a tiny trans-coding device out there somewhere?
Would a NUC do? How old or new to churn out 4k x265
Can I avoid hardware? Are cloud gpu’s a thing?
As the other person said, NUCs and such are able to do transcodes via Intel QuickSync hardware acceleration, it’s not really possible to transcode 4k in realtime on most CPUs without it.
You will need at least an 8th gen Intel processor to do HVEC which is what h265 uses, more info is in this chart on Wikipedia about which generations support which things. Anecdotally, this has worked extremely well for me for a long time, definitely worth it.
Also be aware if you are doing any virtualization you will need to pass the iGPU through to the guest machine.
7th gen Intel (Kaby Lake) can encode h265, also. Not just 8th gen.
Source: I encode to h265 almost daily using Quicksync on my i5-7500.