There are so many options out there, it’s kind of dizzying.
I’m looking for a cheap solution that I could hook up to a TV and ethernet, so it could run a flavor of Linux (or BSD) and play videos at 1080p. Bonus points if it can handle 1080p@60 FPS. Other than that, it would be used for light web browsing.
I was looking at Raspberry Pi 4, but is there anything else you would suggest?
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Especially since it can be hard to find ARM-based boards like Rock and Raspberry pi’s right now without kits, a used dell optiplex yanked from a work environment on Ebay costs like $100 and will more than handle this use case.
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Yeah, even those old 2 gb AMD or Nvidia cards will do the trick.
https://libreelec.tv/ might be of some interest if you want a media Pi OS
Thanks! I’ll have a look.
RPi4 B would be a great solution to this (especially for the price, I mean wow that’s a steal). I was gonna look around for suggestions but those just have such good prices. I have the RPi 3 A+ and that I use to emulate NES games on a 4k TV (1080p output). Works great, but probably not as intensive as 1080p video playback.
As it turns out, my brother had one on hand to try out and it played 1080p movies just fine. So yeah, RPi 4 is probably what I’m going with. Either that or a Rock64.
I would go with the RPi 4 over the Rock64, but it’s entirely personal preference.
My main rig is an Rpi 4 8 gb. Instead of an SD card I have a 250 gb ssd as it’s boot and storage. I’m probably never going to build or buy another rig ever again.
Probably an Amlogic S905X.
I am unsure if the GPU on RPi3 can handle 1080@60. It might become choppy or laggy. 720p is handled fine on it, though.
You also want to have hardware that you can run more than just one video on, because there is always extra workload going on.
I would buy a used mini-PC or even a Mac mini with Linux on it. I can get them for as low as 30-40 euro with a decent processor, memory and HDD. LibreElec is great but I wouldn’t use it if I also wanted to do some web browsing.
