Recommended mini linux device for streaming to TV

I have been using this since 2020. https://www.amazon.com/Dell-E6430-Processor-Professional-Refurbished/dp/B06Y1FJNYP Not powerful by today's standards but still does the job. It is running Almalinux. For the keyboard, I am using this https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Wireless-Keyboard-Multi-Touch-Touchpad/dp/B005DKZTMG

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.

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.

I use a Pi running LibreElec....basically packages OSMC.

Plug it into a smart TV with HDMI and your tv remote can control the Pi OSMC Interface...no need for a separate remote...I was pleasantly surprised at that.

Some of these words I recognize...
- Look up "raspberry pi kodi". That may or may not help depending on which words you understood

Hot take, just get an old Chromecast HD

I use "Beelink" brand mini PCs for this purpose. (They are the same form factor as your photo.) I have three, and they're all good. I've used multiple distros on them with no compatibility issues, but MX Linux is my daily driver.

They have fans built in, but the cases on the higher end ones are metal, which helps with heat dissipation. The only downside with that is that sometimes USB peripherals get super hot while plugged in, and I had a mouse dongle that would overheat and malfunction. A simple USB hub fixed this problem (the hub itself apparently didn't mind getting hot).

I use a "Mini Keyboard with touchpad" on the ones connected to TVs. I recommend those as well. Rii brand is decent.

@OP: Which option did you decide on in the end? Reading through the comments as someone in a similar situation, going for a NUC(-like) with Intel n150 and installing fitting Linux distros/software seemed the easiest choice. What was your take-away? :)

my old laptop😅 and a bluetooth keyboard/touchpad. If it is not too noisy and performs well enough, I might make that a dedicated tv device (but then I will have to buy a new laptop lol, I've been drooling on framework for a while).
Alternatively one of the n150 options, like you say. In which case I can update this post

Keep an eye on the HDMI version - 1.4 will only give you 30fps at 4k. You need 2.0 to get 60fps.

Great tip, thanks!

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.

I use a Raspberry Pi 5 with LibreELEC

That is pretty expensive nowadays, if OP wants to go that expensive, getting a mini PC with the latest intel N150. The pi 5 doesn't even have hardware AV1 decoding. By the time you have all of the pi accessories, it is not much of a price difference, but defi itely a performance difference.
https://amzn.eu/d/85cytyZ
Plus you get benefits like actual storage instead of a separately bought SD card, more RAM, 2.5G ethernet, and HDMI2.1 & USB–C displayport.
Then you slap Linux on it (and also hope that plasma bigscreen is a success in the near future) and you have a very reliable 4K HTPC that can decode anything you throw at it. It has enough horsepower to be a home server at the same time, unlike a pi while also having just a bit higher idle power usage (2W or so).
same here, with NVMe-Board
Thx for the tip!
- Honestly I’ve got the kids bedroom tv on a Pi 3 running LibrElec just fine. Kodi isn’t that resource intensive so it works great. But if you’re feeling fancy setting up a db to hold all your info so you can share it on multiple end really is nice. I love being able to stop a movie in the living room because I’m getting tired and pick it up in the bedroom at the exact same spot.
- If you ever want to buy raspberry pi, don't forget to get a cooler either passive or active. Those things gets hot quickly without a cooler.

I use RPi4, it works well except with some h265 where it really sucks, laggy video, maybe it is because of the software (I use raspbian+vlc). Otherwise its great, silent, Low consumtion, etc

Dell Optiplex 3050

Lenovo m720

HP whatever with a 7th gen Intel

All can be had for $50 ish

I was in a similar boat. I've been using a Ryzen 5000-based mini PC for about two years now. It's running:

Debian for stability

Flex Launcher for the 10ft TV UI

Flex Launcher has shortcuts for Plex HTPC, Netflix in a full screen Chrome page, etc.

An AirMouse Remote with a keyboard on the back and basic controls up front. It has 5 programmable IR buttons that I have bound to TV Power, TV Input, TV Select, and Sound Bar Vol-/+

My kids also use it for Steam and Retro gaming, so I have it launch ES-DE and Steam Big Picture Mode from Flex Launcher.

Other than the occasional tweaking, it has needed very little and been rock solid for about 2 years now. I have a cheap Android TV set top box still attached for when Grandma goes to use the TV. I can switch inputs and hand them the Google TV remote, but my wife, my kids, and I use the HTPC almost exclusively.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-m1s-with-4gbyte-ram/

I've been using the original m1 running a lineage OS based android TV for a couple years. It's perfect. I added a nvme drive for a "DVR" in tivimate, but we rarely use it. I use a cheapo 2.4ghz remote from Amazon.

Literally anything can be a streaming target. You don't need a full on PC. RPi works well.

I use RPi5 for this and have it hooked up to steam link.
can stream at 4k with no issue.

Been using Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM, and swapping between Android 16 (KonstaKANG's AOSP fork) for Grayjay and NewPipe, and some random Linux distro for Kodi and other offline stuff.

So far working nicely.

Thx for the tip!
BTW you can use Waydroid to run Android apps on Linux.
- (Thinking aloud) Wonder if it works in ARM devices and with programs that require constant connection... 👀
  Thanks! Will be cooking something now =D

Older 10th gen Intel NUCs go for cheap on eBay, with memory and storage -- close in price to a Raspberry Pi 5, but more powerful, active cooling without having to buy a kit, and may have greater longevity. An alternative to a Pi if you're looking for one.

My experience with Intel NUCs is that longevity is their greatest weakness. Usually burn themselves out in a few years. Prospects for repair being slim. I’m not sure if Pis are any better, but I haven’t been impressed.
- How do they burn out? Anecdotal, but I've had one running nearly 24/7 for about 6 years now I think and only needed to swap out the fan.
After getting an NUC, what would you install to make it more streaming UI friendly?
Or are you suggesting to just use the tv as a large monitor and stream via websites and browser?
- Fedora and plasma run well on my nucs. One is about 7 years old and handles all the minimal things like streaming and containerized services really well.
- That's what I do. I have a bunch of .desktop files that just open Firefox in kiosk mode to whichever website I want, and a bunch of .PNG files to make them look like apps. I installed them system-wide.
  I'm a pretty big KDE Stan but I decided to give Gnome a go since Plasma Bigscreen is virtually impossible to install for a normal user at the moment. Its not perfect but it gets the job done, and I love the basic parental controls it has. Still absolutely awful in terms of settings though.
- I use an N95 mini pc, I have it set up with xubuntu (compositing turned off), and it's loaded with Kodi (+Jellyfin add-ons), and used with a USB remote control. It's a super-smooth. I cast music to Kodi from my phone with Symfonium.

Got myself a NUC11 with Intel Celeron N5105. Could've installed the good old Debian, but wanted something a little more exciting, so went with OpenSUSE Leap 16 Beta instead.

Does anyone have a suggestion for something that can be used with a remote? AndroidTV boxes don't seem to be a consistent thing anymore beyond NVIDIA shields..

The Google TV boxes (onn) from Walmart are a solid option. $49 for the Pro is an excellent price for the hardware.
I use a Pi running LibreElec and it can be controlled by my LG TV down the HDMI cable. It's the CEC protocol. Look into that.
- You said my line!
Intel NUCs typically have an IR receiver
An Airmouse is a gamechanger.
Its a TV-remote-style device that works like a Wii remote to control the mouse, usually has a keyboard on the backside, and connects to a USB 2.4ghz or Bluetooth receiver depending on the model you get.
I got a $20 Rii and a $10 other brand one to try out. Both are fine. I like the buttons on the Rii better but it has no backlight which sucks because I'm usually watching TV in bed at 9pm. The $10 one's keyboard also responds faster so I can actually speed type.
I've tried Kodi on librelec, the old Xbox launcher. It has an app called kodi remote: your phone is the remote.
Currently I'm using an old 2013 laptop with Debian and xfce. I've installed KDE connect on it, and it also has an app KDE connect that turns your phone into the remote.
The main advantage of the remote on your phone is you can type text, copy/paste URLs, passwords and whatnot
Why not just use a bluetooth or 2.4g remote?
Formuler Z11 Pro Max
Might be worth looking into FLIRC USB
- Random fun fact: back in college, my girlfriend's best friend (and my best friend's girlfriend) was named Elisa. This being the early 2000s, I used an old school flip phone that had T9 for text entry. But "Elisa" wasn't in the T9 dictionary, so I would hit 3-5-4-7 and it would prompt "Elis"—presumably expecting an "e" after—but once I hit that last 2, it would change to "flirc."
  It's interesting that that's actually become a thing now.
- I bought one of these a while back but could never get it working. Skill issue probably 😅 I'll try it out again!
Bazzite + gamepad

I finally got round to buying the Beelink EQ14 I'd promised myself. Sips electricity & handles 4k content. Can't comment re usage as I havent got round to setting it up yet. I believe it shipped with Win11 but I'll be putting linux on it

I'll double the Beelink recco. Using a SER5 for a few years now as dual boot windows and linux as an HTPC. Zero issues with PC at 4k and 5.1. My only issue is Dirac doesn't support linux, but that is neither here nor there.

If you have an android TV, there's a Jellyfin app for TV on there. Otherwise we use a Chromecast with Google TV dongle/remote that works pretty well.

This is what I use too. But, I would like to not have a Google device as part of my chain. (I say on my Pixel phone, with stock android).
- its still google tv but the onn boxes work great and you can easily setup a custom launcher etc.
- I agree it's not ideal, but they're cheap devices that require little setup. Its not like you need to pay a subscription fee to use them for Jellyfin, so I'm okay with it on balance.
  Replied from my Pixel phone with stock android as well.

I use a Beelink SER5, but that's because I also plan to set it up to be a retro game console, in addition to streaming.

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.

I use a raspberry pi 3 A+. The only thing that sucks is no h265 support.

I tried this with zeroPi and jellyfin, bit the Pi seemed constantly overwhelmed with displaying videos, so I got about a frame every 2 seconds (might have been a pi3b). Have you got any clue what the issue might be? It depended a lot on the particular file I wanted to play as well though, but I wasn't able to find a pattern. Of two matroska/mp4 files one worked well, the other stuttered as hell.
- The only thing I have experience with is that the pi’s struggle with newer codecs, like h264 runs perfectly but any video that is h265 is a slide show, if you get an image at all. So I have to be really careful which version of a video I download. It sucks because h264 files are significantly larger due to its inferior compression.

I've just set up Jellyfin on an Intel NUC with a Celeron J4025, 8GB ram and 1TB ssd and it works flawlessly, can handle at least 3 4k (hardware accelerated) transcodes (didn't test with more). No tone mapping tho, its pretty slow. The thing cost me around 140 eur.

If you really want tone mapping and don't have the budget/space for a dgpu I heard the Intel N100/N150 mini pcs (like you picked) are great. I would be a little worried about the ram tho.

https://www.komplett.no/product/1324158/pc-tilbehoer/stasjonaer-pc/asus-nuc-14-essential-n150

Vi bruker mengder av disse som avspillere for infoskjermer. Har brukt intel sine også, kjørt linux på de siden 2016.

Tak for mengder av info(skjermer), AV spiller!

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 used this Beelink as a steam OS machine, I'm sure it could handle streaming.

The mini PC you ask about might lack a bit of RAM and SSD but I think it's good enough for how you plan to use it. The only drawback I see here depending on how you plan to use it, is that if you don't have another device on which you can store your media you will be short on storage very quick.

I recently bought a cheap NAS for storage + a mini PC to stream medias to my local devices through jellyfin and couldn't be happier. If you can look the geekom air12 lite mini PC with the N150 CPU, it's what I got, havent had much trouble to set it up and it's cheap for what it offers imo.

Another advice : ask yourself if you think your setup will evolve in the future and try to imagine how you want it to evolve, if your solution isn't adjustable enough you might have a hard time changing every part of your setup and do it all again.

Thanks for the tip! I actually have an old intel celeron running as a server in the basement, so the bare minimum for this is playing media from the network. But, being able to play simple games could also be fun, so have to think about that one for a bit!

what is wrong with an android box?

You cannot install everything you could on regular android and if you manage to they won't be remote friendly. Linux apps however can support controllers. Moroever, android boxes come with a default bloated launcher and even though you can switch it a lot of things stay unremovable
- Also, in my experience of trying Android boxes first and ending up with a Mini-PC with Linux, the Android boxes which are cheaper than basic Mini-PCs like the one with an N100 that I have, are underpowered, and the one's which aren't underpowered cost about the same as the Mini-PC.
  Further, you can install all manner of services running on the background on the Linux machine: mine works as TV Box with Kodi as the frontend that's displayed on my TV, but it's also working as my home NAS and runs a bittorrent server with a web interface on top of an always on VPN, all of which uses very little of its computing power. I manage the "linuxy" stuff remotely via web-interfaces and SSH whilst in the living room were it is I actually have a remote for it and use it just like a regular TV Box.
  This in addition to as you pointed out the Android stuff being locked down and often bloated.
  I really would advise people against an Android TV box, but if one really wants the lower consumption of those (they do consume half as much power as my Mini-PC, with TDPs around 8W or less to the Mini-PC's 15W) best get an SBC and a box for it, and then install Libreelec on it or a full linux distro (often the manufacturers have a Linux distro for those and there's always Armbian),

I've seen these MeLe sticks before that are intriguing: https://www.amazon.com.au/MeLE-Upgraged-PCG02-Computer-Industrial/dp/B0DK4Z9YSH

$120. Arch installed no problem, & everyþing worked OOTB
$210. Again, Arch installed no issue, everyþing worked OOTB.

Þe latter is really þe best deal: AMD's þe better CPU, 12 cores, integrated Ryzen graphics, 16GB, 500GB NVMe, and both memory and NVMe are trivial to upgrade. I used it as a desktop, until I got a more recent one. Even þough it's a mobile CPU, it still seems like an insanely good deal, to me.

But þe first does þe trick for half þe price if you know you're only using it to stream.

Never heard of the brand/model, thanks! Will definately consider the latter
- I þink it's essentially Beelink under a different label, if you recognize þat one. I'd never heard of þem until I started buying þem. Which is twice; I got a Ryzen 7 version þe second time. I'm very happy wiþ boþ.

I scored an embedded box 3000 we use in the bedroom

minisforum um890 has been working well with nobara. sleep works on 6.15.

Mele quieter 4c has been really good to me. I was using a celeron nuc, it worked fine, but for quiet moments in videos i could hear the fan. It wasnt obnoxious, but once i noticed it i couldnt ignore it. Mele is passively cooled and the n100 is more than adequate for 4k.

go to wal mart and get an ONN device. The Pro 4k is $50, Android 14. Will run Plex, Tvmate, vlc, netflix apple tv, and any other TV / Video app you want to run.

Can you say anything about privacy?
- Lol. Lmao even.
  If it has google play services on it, at all, there is absolutely no privacy.
  If you can manage to stick to an F-droid+Aurora+Obtainium setup (maybe with IzzyOndroid enabled in F-droid), you can probably pull off privacy, but in my experience there are at least three major streaming services ive encountered that refuse to run if Google Play Services aren't running and you can't pass the SafetyNet authenticity/security check thing (which raspberry pi is missing the firmware and hardware to be able to support.) Netflix being the biggest of them, I think Disney Plus has issues, and it's been a while since I tried but either crunchyroll or hbo Max gave me a hard time.

I use a Dell Wyze 5070 Thin Client. It costs around 60€, I run DietPi on it because that shit is dope.

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.

What about an Odroid N2+? That could run coreelec or Android well? For Jellyfin its great, though you're very like going to run into issues if you want the likes of Netflix on it.

If you're not allergic to Amazon, a FireTV stick might be enough, at least for Jellyfin, Youtube/Netflix etc. (not sure about streaming from the browser).