This is really sad. Me and my girlfriend at the time watched all of our movies off of a Pi 1 and a USB hard drive when it came out. Those days are long gone.

You can still buy a 4GB HP T520 thin client for around $25 on eBay. The Radeon GPU has a HW h264 decoder.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185826328888?_skw=hp+t520

You don't need the 16GB model to watch movies, you can do that on the cheapest ones.