I've had one for about 7 years now that's been my htpc. Nice, little, quiet, and it worked great. Was thinking about upgrading soon. Guess I'll have to figure something else out.
Comparable in what way, size?
The NUCs are a bit too expensive though and plenty of x264 content still available.
Similar issue with x265 content though. I've solved that by just using Apple TVs for our two TVs—also fixes any worries about surround not outputting correctly or whatever, that you can run into with hacked-together solutions. Spendy, but they've wasted none of my time and have never not-worked. Any other devices we connect to it with (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones) all support x265, so that's a non-issue. Maybe newer Rokus support x265, IDK, but none of mine do, which is the only reason I'm not still using those as my set-top client devices.
(if you stick with Kodi, though: RPi4 supports hardware x265, I think)
They have hardware x264 and x265 decoding, support is great too.