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
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.
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.