Does anyone have a good guideline for computing requirements? I’m not planning to stream like with PleX or anything, I just want something I can stick on the back of my projector and forget about except for when I want to watch something or download something.
Requirements
- Small form factor
- Low power draw
- Enough SSD space for ~6 movies
- Storage expandable by external flash device
- Wi-Fi (my modem can’t be moved closer)
- Bluetooth AND 3.5 mm for audio out
Something like the Nvidia Shield would be perfect but its too hard to download things onto it directly. Ideally, I wouldn’t have to have a personal computer other than this device. Currently, I plug my laptop in and stream, but my streaming sites no longer work well and it does not have the storage for me to download movies.
Since I am not trying to use this as a home server to stream off of, I shouldn’t need a lot of computing power for transcoding or parallel sessions or nothing like that.
AS mentioned in the title, my budget is around $150 (not including external storage). Any more than that, and it’s not worth upgrading from my laptop.
I use an asus cn62 chromebox for my jellyfin. A Celeron model. Got it for like $30 off eBay with a power cord and then upgraded the ram and SSD.
Not sure about the Bluetooth and audio out tho. But thin clients or an old sff dell optiplex is probably the way you wanna go.
You can typically find the little refurbed dell Optiplex towers for that.
The “micro” models are very small and would likely work
find a used NUC, or a mini-pc like a dell optiplex
Make sure whatever you get has native hardware decoding for whatever formats of video you download, otherwise youre going to struggle with watching video.
Mini pcs from aliexpress. Go for 12th gen intel ones
Raspberry Pi 3-B is $35. You can get a half TB micro-ssd for $30. Plenty of cash left over to splurge on a fancy case off etsy if you want.
You could get the latest, Raspberry Pi 5, for $80 and still be under budget but they removed the 3.5mm and HDMI port in version 4 for a single usb-c out that can do AV.
I dont think rpi3B can handle x265 encoding. rpi4 can i think. Or an Odroid is an option + coreELEC. CE supports entware and docker so you can install all kinds of stuff on it, for downloading torrents or whatnot.
