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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

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[–] eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip 4 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Do you know what number model it is? I tried using an old 2B but it was too slow and doesn't have hardware decoding as far as I can tell. I've heard you need around 4B for media playback, but the price is not so great for a simple use like this. Stick PCs seemed to have some cheaper options, including hardware decoding, with the advantage of plugging straight into the HDMI port

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

All of the Raspberry Pi models have hardware decoding. Even a Pi 1B will play a 30 mbps 1080p bluray rip. I used to run OpenELEC on a 1B. The interface on XBMC was really laggy, but h.264 videos played smoothly.

You need a Pi 4 or newer for h.265 hardware decoding. The Pi 3 has enough power to software decode some h.265 videos.

The video player you use needs to be compiled specifically for a Raspberry Pi for the hardware decoding to work though.

[–] anyhow2503@lemmy.world 2 points 44 minutes ago

The Raspberry Pi 5 doesn't have h264 hardware decoding blocks anymore afaik. But it's fast enough to do better and faster software decoding anyway from what I've heard.

[–] AMillionMonkeys@lemmy.world 6 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

I'm pretty sure mine is a 2B as well, but I'd have to go digging behind the TV to know for sure. I know it's not newer than that. It works fine for me running LibreElec+Kodi+Jellyfin, but I don't play anything more complicated than 1080p h264. If you want HD or Atmos or whatever complications, yeah, you'll want hardware decoding.
The ethernet jack is also a plus for me, but I think most video will stream satisfactorily over WiFi these days.

[–] eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip 3 points 9 hours ago

I tried using the pi 2B again, I've been using the GUI & browser to show jellyfin and the interface is so sluggish I think it would be hard to use regardless of the ability to play videos

[–] eyesaremosaics@lemmy.zip 3 points 12 hours ago

Ok interesting it looks like it does do 1080p H264 hardware decoding https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/pdfs/raspberrypi2modelb.pdf

Pretty sure I tested mine on video playback and it struggled (quite badly), but I didn't check the playback format, maybe if you stick to the right codec then it works.