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

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • yaroto98@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

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

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
        2·
        19 hours ago

        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
          2·
          19 hours ago

          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
            2·
            15 hours ago

            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
              2·
              14 hours ago

              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.

              • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
                1·
                14 hours ago

                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
                  1·
                  14 hours ago

                  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.