Are mini stick PCs practical to set up as a media player, eg with jellyfin? Some advantages are the small form factor that plugs straight into the HDMI port, and flexibility/privacy vs using a dongle from a shitty company like amazon/google/roku.

Are there any things to watch out for to ensure it has enough compute power and hardware decoding? I just want it to play HD video with a jellyfin app/browser page.

I’m assuming it’s no big deal to install Linux on (x86 hardware?), do you need to watch out for specific device support? Thanks

  • yaroto98@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    14 天前

    Interesting, I assume lmde would be comparable to a say fedora based plasma bigscreen install resource wise. It’s not like you were using a super lightweight distro. I’m actually surprised the plasma bigscreen devs haven’t made a super light weight install guide based off alpine or a pared down debian or arch for lowend hardware like OP is asking about.

    • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
      3·
      14 天前

      I’m hoping the BigScreen install would be better as a settopbox, but I wanted a portable PC lol

      It was smooth enough, just slow. A bit expected for how intensive lmde is, but I really wanted it to work with that. Maybe I’m judging too harshly

      • yaroto98@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        14 天前

        I’ve been looking into these PCs as a replacement roku box since responding to the thread. I have a shield, and its fine, but I don’t think it’s worth the price. It’s glitchy and the 3rd party launcher sometimes flips out. It also keeps wanting me to up the refresh rate, but whenever I do, it breaks. My TV doesn’t like it despite it being supported.

        • DaGeek247@fedia.io
          2·
          12 天前

          I use a vero 4k. They’ve since dropped support (after seven years) and put out a new model with av1 support. It stills works incredibly well as a jellyfin client box.

        • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
          2·
          14 天前

          It might be fine for that, I’m not sure. It kind of sucked playing HD video (hadn’t tried 4k), but it was trying to do so under a full lmde environment lol

          • yaroto98@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            14 天前

            Hmmmm good to know. I’m sure the N100 models could handle it fine. Still tempting to pick up one of the cheap ones to play with. Kind of like a raspberry pi.