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

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    My main bedroom pc is a stick pc (Intel compute stick; the M5 version). I can run Fallout 3 on it… I’m pretty sure it can handle JF (though it currently runs Linux mint and isn’t set up for it). I also had a gen 1 or 2 I donated recently - that struggled with basic Debian 11 / YouTube playback.

    The thing is tho, the compute stick is a x86…and outside of it or rolling your own (via a Pi zero 2W and HDMI case) most of the ready made compute sticks are 1) android 2) of dubious provenance (rebranded Xiaomi etc).

    Compute sticks sit in an awkward middle ground - too much grunt for pure media streamer, not quite enough for serious computing. Though I suspect the m5 could actually act as a JF server (assuming no transcode)

    But it depends. Which one were you thinking of getting? And are we talking client or server?

    PS: my raspberry pi 4, 4B was my main JF server for several years. No transcoding… but quite capable of serving up to 6 or more simultaneous streams (720/1080. 4K it could barely do 1)