Looking for a simple mini device that I can plug into TV for streaming stuff via browser/jellyfin and similar, with hdmi and control via bluetooth keyboard/mouse. What do you guys recommend?
Would this be powerful enough for example? https://www.komplett.no/product/1323029/pc-tilbehoer/stasjonaer-pc/acer-revo-box-mini-pc
EDIT: lemmy is awesome, thanks to you I’ll save myself a ton of work and/or costly mistakes
I was in a similar boat. I’ve been using a Ryzen 5000-based mini PC for about two years now. It’s running:
Debian for stability
Flex Launcher for the 10ft TV UI
Flex Launcher has shortcuts for Plex HTPC, Netflix in a full screen Chrome page, etc.
An AirMouse Remote with a keyboard on the back and basic controls up front. It has 5 programmable IR buttons that I have bound to TV Power, TV Input, TV Select, and Sound Bar Vol-/+
My kids also use it for Steam and Retro gaming, so I have it launch ES-DE and Steam Big Picture Mode from Flex Launcher.
Other than the occasional tweaking, it has needed very little and been rock solid for about 2 years now. I have a cheap Android TV set top box still attached for when Grandma goes to use the TV. I can switch inputs and hand them the Google TV remote, but my wife, my kids, and I use the HTPC almost exclusively.
I use a raspberry pi 3 A+. The only thing that sucks is no h265 support.
I tried this with zeroPi and jellyfin, bit the Pi seemed constantly overwhelmed with displaying videos, so I got about a frame every 2 seconds (might have been a pi3b). Have you got any clue what the issue might be? It depended a lot on the particular file I wanted to play as well though, but I wasn’t able to find a pattern. Of two matroska/mp4 files one worked well, the other stuttered as hell.
The only thing I have experience with is that the pi’s struggle with newer codecs, like h264 runs perfectly but any video that is h265 is a slide show, if you get an image at all. So I have to be really careful which version of a video I download. It sucks because h264 files are significantly larger due to its inferior compression.
I scored an embedded box 3000 we use in the bedroom
I use “Beelink” brand mini PCs for this purpose. (They are the same form factor as your photo.) I have three, and they’re all good. I’ve used multiple distros on them with no compatibility issues, but MX Linux is my daily driver.
They have fans built in, but the cases on the higher end ones are metal, which helps with heat dissipation. The only downside with that is that sometimes USB peripherals get super hot while plugged in, and I had a mouse dongle that would overheat and malfunction. A simple USB hub fixed this problem (the hub itself apparently didn’t mind getting hot).
I use a “Mini Keyboard with touchpad” on the ones connected to TVs. I recommend those as well. Rii brand is decent.
https://www.komplett.no/product/1324158/pc-tilbehoer/stasjonaer-pc/asus-nuc-14-essential-n150
Vi bruker mengder av disse som avspillere for infoskjermer. Har brukt intel sine også, kjørt linux på de siden 2016.
ASUS NUC’s are great for simple self hosting needs, got a 13th gen NUC myself with an i7, Proxmox as the host with a headless Debian 13 VM for a virtualized environment.
I used this Beelink as a steam OS machine, I’m sure it could handle streaming.
Keep an eye on the HDMI version - 1.4 will only give you 30fps at 4k. You need 2.0 to get 60fps.
Great tip, thanks!
If you’re not allergic to Amazon, a FireTV stick might be enough, at least for Jellyfin, Youtube/Netflix etc. (not sure about streaming from the browser).
The mini PC you ask about might lack a bit of RAM and SSD but I think it’s good enough for how you plan to use it. The only drawback I see here depending on how you plan to use it, is that if you don’t have another device on which you can store your media you will be short on storage very quick.
I recently bought a cheap NAS for storage + a mini PC to stream medias to my local devices through jellyfin and couldn’t be happier. If you can look the geekom air12 lite mini PC with the N150 CPU, it’s what I got, havent had much trouble to set it up and it’s cheap for what it offers imo.
Another advice : ask yourself if you think your setup will evolve in the future and try to imagine how you want it to evolve, if your solution isn’t adjustable enough you might have a hard time changing every part of your setup and do it all again.
I use RPi4, it works well except with some h265 where it really sucks, laggy video, maybe it is because of the software (I use raspbian+vlc). Otherwise its great, silent, Low consumtion, etc
Got myself a NUC11 with Intel Celeron N5105. Could’ve installed the good old Debian, but wanted something a little more exciting, so went with OpenSUSE Leap 16 Beta instead.
go to wal mart and get an ONN device. The Pro 4k is $50, Android 14. Will run Plex, Tvmate, vlc, netflix apple tv, and any other TV / Video app you want to run.
Can you say anything about privacy?
Lol. Lmao even.
If it has google play services on it, at all, there is absolutely no privacy.
If you can manage to stick to an F-droid+Aurora+Obtainium setup (maybe with IzzyOndroid enabled in F-droid), you can probably pull off privacy, but in my experience there are at least three major streaming services ive encountered that refuse to run if Google Play Services aren’t running and you can’t pass the SafetyNet authenticity/security check thing (which raspberry pi is missing the firmware and hardware to be able to support.) Netflix being the biggest of them, I think Disney Plus has issues, and it’s been a while since I tried but either crunchyroll or hbo Max gave me a hard time.
Who said anything about streaming services? What an absurdly silly way to throw away money in this day and age. In this economy?
I kid, but yeah OP was asking about browser/jellyfin streaming.
I use a Raspberry Pi 5 with LibreELEC
Thx for the tip!
Honestly I’ve got the kids bedroom tv on a Pi 3 running LibrElec just fine. Kodi isn’t that resource intensive so it works great. But if you’re feeling fancy setting up a db to hold all your info so you can share it on multiple end really is nice. I love being able to stop a movie in the living room because I’m getting tired and pick it up in the bedroom at the exact same spot.
The shared backend db with MariaDB was always janky for me. I switched to using Jellyfin for the backend, which tbf could be overkill if you just need the watch states synced.
If you ever want to buy raspberry pi, don’t forget to get a cooler either passive or active. Those things gets hot quickly without a cooler.
That is pretty expensive nowadays, if OP wants to go that expensive, getting a mini PC with the latest intel N150. The pi 5 doesn’t even have hardware AV1 decoding. By the time you have all of the pi accessories, it is not much of a price difference, but defi itely a performance difference.
Plus you get benefits like actual storage instead of a separately bought SD card, more RAM, 2.5G ethernet, and HDMI2.1 & USB–C displayport.
Then you slap Linux on it (and also hope that plasma bigscreen is a success in the near future) and you have a very reliable 4K HTPC that can decode anything you throw at it. It has enough horsepower to be a home server at the same time, unlike a pi while also having just a bit higher idle power usage (2W or so).
same here, with NVMe-Board
Dell Optiplex 3050
Lenovo m720
HP whatever with a 7th gen Intel
All can be had for $50 ish
