Aopen Mini PC and HDTV playback question

[Synchromesh]

I have a question about my Aopen mini PC. It's a 915X machine with a 2.13GHz P-M, 2GB RAM and i915-based integrated video. It refuses (not surprisingly) to play HD movies in Win XP because the videocard is just way too slow for that. But I've done some reading and from what I gather certain Linux distros fix that problem by relegating some of the video processing from GPU onto CPU. I suppose that would work with a dual core processor where one core could handle the video while the other handles everything else. What are my chances to get this to run well on a (relatively fast) single core platform with a crappy videocard?