Recommended mini linux device for streaming to TV

Keep an eye on the HDMI version - 1.4 will only give you 30fps at 4k. You need 2.0 to get 60fps.

I use one of these which I got from AliExpress along with one of these, though of course it will work fine with mouse and keyboard.

(Please note that I haven't tested it specifically with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse).

I installed Lubuntu on it because it's a lighter distro (it will work fine with the full desktop Linux distros, but why waste computing power on fancy window managers for something that's just a TV Box that's always showing Kodi) and have it always turned on (the TDP of this is pretty low) with Kodi as interface and its runs perfectly.

It's sitting on my living room under the TV.

It's probably a little overpowered, but that means its fan almost never turns on (it's pretty quiet when it does, but silence is better), so I'm also running a bittorrent server on it with an always on VPN, plus it's my NAS. There's room for more if I wanted.

I don't really understand people advising the more powerful Mini-PCs: they're way overpowered for the job hence needlessly expensive plus the TDP of their processors is way more than the N100 in this one hence it both consumes more and is a lot less quiet because the fan has to be bigger and running a lot more often to cool that hotter processor down.

PS: Also the downside of using old PCs for this as some recommend is their higher power consumption, even for notebooks, plus they generally don't really look like a nice TV-Box to have in your living room, which this one does. If you're going to run it all the time, a low TDP mini-pc will probably quickly pay itself over using an old desktop, longer if versus an old notebook.

Your old laptop & a generic bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo unit.

That is my setup. :)

I use a Raspberry Pi 5 with LibreELEC

Literally anything can be a streaming target. You don't need a full on PC. RPi works well.

Does anyone have a suggestion for something that can be used with a remote? AndroidTV boxes don't seem to be a consistent thing anymore beyond NVIDIA shields..

Older 10th gen Intel NUCs go for cheap on eBay, with memory and storage -- close in price to a Raspberry Pi 5, but more powerful, active cooling without having to buy a kit, and may have greater longevity. An alternative to a Pi if you're looking for one.

Been using Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM, and swapping between Android 16 (KonstaKANG's AOSP fork) for Grayjay and NewPipe, and some random Linux distro for Kodi and other offline stuff.

So far working nicely.

If you have an android TV, there's a Jellyfin app for TV on there. Otherwise we use a Chromecast with Google TV dongle/remote that works pretty well.

I finally got round to buying the Beelink EQ14 I'd promised myself. Sips electricity & handles 4k content. Can't comment re usage as I havent got round to setting it up yet. I believe it shipped with Win11 but I'll be putting linux on it

I use a raspberry pi 3 A+. The only thing that sucks is no h265 support.

an old laptop if you have one first, then one of them intel nucs. intel is better a trancoding or some such thing.

The mini PC you ask about might lack a bit of RAM and SSD but I think it's good enough for how you plan to use it. The only drawback I see here depending on how you plan to use it, is that if you don't have another device on which you can store your media you will be short on storage very quick.

I recently bought a cheap NAS for storage + a mini PC to stream medias to my local devices through jellyfin and couldn't be happier. If you can look the geekom air12 lite mini PC with the N150 CPU, it's what I got, havent had much trouble to set it up and it's cheap for what it offers imo.

Another advice : ask yourself if you think your setup will evolve in the future and try to imagine how you want it to evolve, if your solution isn't adjustable enough you might have a hard time changing every part of your setup and do it all again.

what is wrong with an android box?

go to wal mart and get an ONN device. The Pro 4k is $50, Android 14. Will run Plex, Tvmate, vlc, netflix apple tv, and any other TV / Video app you want to run.

Do you need it to do realtime video transcoding of high resolution video (>1080p)? If so, you may need a video card to do it efficiently. Otherwise, that should be more than sufficient. I know others have recommended a raspberry pi, but I don't think jellyfin supports arm CPUs, though I could be wrong. So you'd have to run it in a virtualization layer and that would increase the hardware resources and may or may not be OK on a pi, but likely would not be as energy efficient as a pi usually is and almost definitely will have trouble with realtime transcoding.

To get around the realtime transcoding you can either make sure your devices support the codecs of the videos you are playing, or you can use a separate device to do batch transcoding of the files before giving them to jellyfin. I haven't implemented jellyfin yet, though it's next on my list, so I'm not sure if there are ways to do background transcoding inside it.

If you're not hung up on Jellyfin, check whatever streaming software for it's hardware recommendations, but Jellyfin is pretty good overall from my playing with it. It's not the lowest resource using system, though.

• $120. Arch installed no problem, & everyþing worked OOTB
• $210. Again, Arch installed no issue, everyþing worked OOTB.

Þe latter is really þe best deal: AMD's þe better CPU, 12 cores, integrated Ryzen graphics, 16GB, 500GB NVMe, and both memory and NVMe are trivial to upgrade. I used it as a desktop, until I got a more recent one. Even þough it's a mobile CPU, it still seems like an insanely good deal, to me.

But þe first does þe trick for half þe price if you know you're only using it to stream.