Your old laptop & a generic bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo unit.

That is my setup. :)

I use a Raspberry Pi 5 with LibreELEC

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

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

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.

Dell Optiplex 3050

Lenovo m720

HP whatever with a 7th gen Intel

All can be had for $50 ish

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.

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.

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

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..

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 scored an embedded box 3000 we use in the bedroom

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

@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? :)

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.

Old i5 Lenovo laptops.