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
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.
I read OP’s question as him streaming from a Jellyfin server to this box, not using this box as a Jellyfin server itself. Could be wrong, though.
Also, it’s my understanding that transcoding is 100% about hardware support for the codecs and that integrated graphics that have it (TL;DR: 12th gen Intel) are going to perform pretty much just as well as even a high-end discrete gaming GPU for that task.
(I say “gaming” GPU because I was reading about the Arc Pro B50 the other day and it has two separate sets of transcoding hardware, so it presumably would actually perform better in terms of the number of simultaneous streams it could handle. But short of something like that, it apparently doesn’t make much difference.)
OK so this is just the client and there’s another server doing Jellyfin server. That changes things. So on the client side yes if all clients support all major codecs then you’re good. Issue comes if one client like a smart TV, this device, or older android device doesn’t have it, then you have to transcode or the client has to software decode which something like a raspberry pi or smart TV is going to have trouble with.