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
    4·
    4 天前

    Interesting, did you have windows on it, or did you throw a real OS on it? If so, what distro/DE?

    • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
      3·
      3 天前

      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.

      • yaroto98@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 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·
          3 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·
            3 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·
              1 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·
              3 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·
                3 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.