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
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.
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
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.