Running everything locally? Hardware-advice?

There has NEVER been an official player for RPi. We’ve never recommended it. Infact we’ve always said it’s not suitable. We even have an FAQ on it here:

You can definitely run the CMS on an RPi if you want to do your own custom installation, and build the zmq modules yourself, but it just isn’t suitable for playback as a Player. You say you can run 1080p content on it, but that’s ALL you’re doing. A Player has alot more work to do than just showing a video. It also has to handle downloads, scheduling, and compositing other media items at the same time. Add to that the horribly closed nature of the hardware and therefore poor driver support, it adds up to a really bad choice of platform.