debian 12.11
system memory size: 31GiB, 2 15.5 GiB cards
cpu: Intel® Core™ i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz, version: 6.142.9, size: 3268MHz, capacity: 3500MHz, width: 64 bits
no graphics card whatsoever
computer can play h.265 and equivalent without troubles, provided video file is no higher than 1080 p.
Computer can play av1 files no higher than 1080 p only if I shut every other application down. If for example I run a browser and an av1 file with either mpv or vlc, system shuts down.
Can I put all that memory to use and avoid overloading the cpu?
Aside from the other answers, no you can’t offload computations to memory. Memory stores data, it doesn’t compute.
The only way having more memory can possibly improve performance, is by having a cached copy of files so they don’t have to be fetched from disk, and applications potentially caching the results of heavy but reusable computations. (Unless you run out of memory and starts spilling over to disk, then more memory will make it fast again by avoiding swapping).
I mean I guess technically yes you could transcode into H264 into a tmpfs mount, and then play the H264, but you’re still not doing it faster and certainly not fast enough to watch in real time, you’re just decoding the AV1 well in advance before actually watching it.