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
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I found this one on amazon
it advertises linux compatibility. So, I’d agree with you, installing shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve heard about a project called Plasma Bigscreen, might be exactly what you’re looking for. I’ve also heard flir remotes work pretty will with linux tv boxes. Those plug pcs have usb slots, you might want to figure out if you need an extension cable so the ir can reach the dongle.
I have one of these, and it sucks as a portable PC. As a jellyfish client, it might do fine. One thing you should know, while the power is USBC, it only works with its own usbc, and that adapter is 24v.
Interesting, did you have windows on it, or did you throw a real OS on it? If so, what distro/DE?
It came with windows 10, and claimed to be upgradeable to 11 (it wasn’t). I used it with lmde, though, so the upgrade lie, while was a shite thing to do, didn’t really affect me.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Ok, I’ve been checking out some older ones for half the price (possibly used as well), the main requirement I’ve been checking is just hardware decoding, with a light weight Linux setup I think it should be sufficient.
The remote is worth considering, I might look into Bluetooth or RF based approaches as they are a bit more flexible than IR with positioning. Or even phone app based methods are possible
Yea, with a full pc setup and OS I don’t think you’ll have a problem with watching media. Even if hardware isn’t available for your cpu (unlikely) software will be. In the jellyfin client you can change your player to vlc if you have any issues playing video.
To also answer the transcoding issue, Jellyfin should be able to handle it. I have had issues where the client thinks it can play a media stream so the server serves it, but the client fails to play it. I usually either download a different file or manually transcode it to a different filetype that I know the client can play. I wouldn’t think a celeron processor would have issues playing media. Those issues were on like firetv or roku embedded system boxes, not full pcs.
As a media client, totally. Lots of people run jellyfin on Android TV sticks and things like that.
A used laptop with a messed up screen will work as well.
It’s more expensive, but I grabbed a vero 4k a couple years back and have been really happy with it. They’ve since put out a new model with av1 support. https://osmc.tv/vero/
It’s just about the best possible dedicated jellyfin client box out there, so I felt it was worth the extra squeeze when I got it. (HDR support even!) It’s all open source though, so support for things like YouTube, netflix, or any other streaming doesn’t really exist in user friendly manner.
I don’t run Jellyfin, so take this as is. From what I understand tho, Jellyfin does take a fair amount of resources to run in an ideal situation. Meaning it takes some RAM for multiple simultaneous transcodes, several users, large libraries, etc. A lot of the cheaper Stick PCs come with less than stellar specs. The Stick PC I just randomly picked because it was 8 GB RAM is a MeLE Business Grade PCG02 Fanless N100 Mini Stick PC 8GB. It retails for $350 USD. For half of that price, you could opt for an SFF Optiplex, bump the DDR3 RAM to max the mobo, and DDR3 is fairly cheap, and still have resources to run other Docker containers if you wanted. For example I run an Optiplex SFF with the i7-4790 chip and 32 GB DDR3 RAM. Currently I have 53 total containers running and it really doesn’t break a sweat. Total cost of the box plus RAM was about $175 USD.If you are going for the portability aspect, that’s where I think a Stick PC would function best. All that being said, you have options just depending on what your criteria are for running Jellyfin.
