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Looking for a simple mini device that I can plug into TV for streaming stuff via browser/jellyfin and similar, with hdmi and control via bluetooth keyboard/mouse. What do you guys recommend?

Would this be powerful enough for example? https://www.komplett.no/product/1323029/pc-tilbehoer/stasjonaer-pc/acer-revo-box-mini-pc

EDIT: lemmy is awesome, thanks to you I'll save myself a ton of work and/or costly mistakes

121 comments

  • Dell Optiplex 3050

    Lenovo m720

    HP whatever with a 7th gen Intel

    All can be had for $50 ish

  • 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.

    • I share the general sentiment but lower TDP does not equal lower consumption, any "mobile" ryzen since the series 4000 on Zen 2 (7nm) is more efficient at most tasks than an N100 (10nm TSMC node), and barring specific mobo issues all have in general very low idle consumptions. But their iGPUs are a lot more capable, faster at anything, no need to limit yourself to a lightweight Desktop manager. Shop used and you might get more bang for your buck with an older ryzen mini pc than a newer N100 one.

      • If the thing is not meant to use as a Desktop, why load it with heavier applications that aren't delivering anything useful?

        No matter how efficient a core is at most tasks, it can't beat the power savings of not actually running needless code.

        My homemade TV Box isn't running a lightweight desktop because I had to "limit myself", it's running one because I'm not losing anything by not having that which I don't use and if that even just saves a few Watts a week, it still means I'm better off, which is satisfying as I like to design my systems to be efficient.

        For fancy Linux Desktop things I have an actual Desktop PC with Linux - the homemade TV Box on my living room is only supposed to let me watch stuff on TV whilst I sit on my sofa.

        Further, there are more than one form of efficiency - stuff like the N100 (and even more, the ARM stuff) are designed for power consumption efficiency, whilst desktop CPUs are designed for ops-per-cycle efficiency, which are not at all the same thing: being capable of doing more operations per cycle doesn't mean something will consume less power in doing so (in fact, generally in Engineering if you optimize in one axis you lose in another) it just means it can reach the end of the task in fewer cycles.

        For a device that during peak use still runs at around 10% CPU usage, having the ability to do things a little faster doesn't really add any value.

        Even the series 4000 Zen2 being more optimized for power consumption is only in the context of desktop computers, a whole different world from what the N100 (and even more things like ARM7) were designed to operate in, which is why the former has a TDP of 140W and the latter of 15W (and the ARMs are around 6W). Sure the TDP is a maximum and hence not a precise metric for a specific use case such as using something as a TV Box, but it's a pretty good indication of how much a core was optimized for power consumption, and 15W vs 140W is a pretty massive distance to expect that any error in using TDP to estimate how the power consumption of those two in everyday use as a TV Box compares would mean that the CPU with 140W TDP consumes less than the one with 15W.

        PS: All that said, if the use case was "selfhosting" rather than "TV Box (with a handful of lightweight services on the side)", you suggestion makes more sense, IMHO.

  • ASUS NUC’s are great for simple self hosting needs, got a 13th gen NUC myself with an i7, Proxmox as the host with a headless Debian 13 VM for a virtualized environment.

  • I'm running MythTV front/back on a Pi4 with one of those generic handheld keyboards. Power consumption is important to me because I live off solar power in a campervan.

    If the Pi4 died tomorrow I'd probably replace it with a ~NUC.

  • Look on eBay for USFF PCs. They're mini computers the size of paperback books that are designed for use in large organisations, and they're made by the usual suspects - HP and Dell mostly. Because they get replaced regularly they're cheap but they're just regular desktop PC hardware. A ten year old i5 can handle being a 4K media centre no problem and can be had for €/£/$70.

  • Had a client who wanted me to setup a geekom mini PC. Very good and reliable. Easy to unscrew and upgrade if needed. Had a crucial memory module and samsung ssd.

  • 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.

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