Mini PC as basic media center?

I know I've seen at least one recent thread on mini PCs...any "experts" here? I'm looking at getting a cheap one to use as a media center of sorts. Basically attach it to my TV and use it to play youtube videos and stream from a hard drive, and maybe some occasional forum browsing and *totally legal* movie downloading. No gaming, I have a dedicated setup for that. I'm trying to figure out what kind of specs I need to do it and not hate the experience and hopefully be somewhat future-proofed (pretty much everything is 1080p at this point but I have a 4K tv and I imagine that will become the standard in the somewhat near future). Mini PCs, at least the ones in the price range I'm looking at, seem to be either a decent CPU with no ram, or lots of ram with a slow CPU. Everything I can find on the internet (plus my own reasoning) says I should be prioritizing CPU/GPU speed. But 4gb of ram just doesn't sound like that much especially because, as I understand it, the integrated graphics on these are sharing ram with the CPU. Does it make sense to just go for the fastest CPU with 4gb ram, or should I give up a little bit of speed for 6 or 8gb or fam? Both options are pretty much the same price, anything with the better CPUs *and* more ram is much more expensive.

I use a Raspberry Pi4 with 2GB to run a Plex server. It's got my music library on it as well as videos. The TV has an AppleTV plugged into it, and I can stream from the Pi to that. The AppleTV also has a YouTube app and can deal with ESPN for F1 or any of the major streaming services, etc. I don't try to do web browsing on the TV so I can't comment on that.

I'm pretty happy with it. I can watch my videos from various devices on my network and it'll remember my spot. I have come across one file that asked too much of the Pi's CPU for transcoding. I fixed it by altering the file - some sort of envelope removal, I forget the details. Can't beat the price of a Pi and a big hard drive though.

It's a little different than what you're asking for. The Apple TV takes care of driving the screen, the Pi/Plex is just another source of media. But it's easy to live with.

What is your budget?  Also at the moment I would wait to build any PC unless you absolutely need one.  There are new GPU's out and more coming shortly and there are CPU's coming from AMD.  All this means that the current stuff will get much cheeper and / or you can get stuff that is more powerful for the same $$$ for the current stuff if you wait a bit.

Buy a Roku with 4K capability, use their media product for watching off of hard drive, Youtube and other apps work great.

You can't browse the web, but really I've done that with previous media centers on large TV's and its mostly worthless and frustrating.  I usually just used VNC from a laptop or tablet to do that.

Note: I moved from home built PC's running Media-Portal (now Kodi) to Raspberry Pi's running Kodi to Roku boxes.  Had IR remotes for them, etc.

The Rpi was a decent solution, but keeping even Youtube working on Raspbian/Kodi was getting difficult due to Google's shenanigans (and the Bay of Pirates fallout in relation to Kodi).  Of course Kodi played backed up movies just fine, but honestly? Commercial streaming was just starting to work so well that it became less and less important to have physical media.

At the end of the day, I just wanted to have something work and the Roku met that goal without being stuck with Apple, Google or Amazon's hardware.

dean1484 said:

What is your budget?  Also at the moment I would wait to build any PC unless you absolutely need one.  There are new GPU's out and more coming shortly and there are CPU's coming from AMD.  All this means that the current stuff will get much cheeper and / or you can get stuff that is more powerful for the same $$$ for the current stuff if you wait a bit.

When is that NOT the case with computers?

Ive had great success with a Nvidia Shield (I dont game at all but its pretty awesome for the price) and a 4Tb Synology Diskstation NAS running some bits of software for managing my offline content and downloading new content.  Somewhat moderate learning curve to get it all working but it passes the Wife Test, and thats very important.  

In reply to Stefan (Forum Supporter) :

I have a roku tv. I want to be able to watch YouTube without ads and not have to screw around with connecting my main pc to the tv to play from the hd. Also planning ahead for a time in my life when my computer doesn't live right next to the tv. Maybe there's an easier way to play from a hard drive, but doesn't solve all my problems and isn't as self contained as just strapping a tiny computer to the back of the tv.

Maybe it wasn't clear, but I'm not talking about building, I'm talking about a $100-150 "mini pc". They use 2-3 year old processors for the most part, so upcoming new tech isn't really a concern.

dps214 said:

In reply to Stefan (Forum Supporter) :

I have a roku tv. I want to be able to watch YouTube without ads and not have to screw around with connecting my main pc to the tv to play from the hd. Also planning ahead for a time in my life when my computer doesn't live right next to the tv. Maybe there's an easier way to play from a hard drive, but doesn't solve all my problems and isn't as self contained as just strapping a tiny computer to the back of the tv.

Maybe it wasn't clear, but I'm not talking about building, I'm talking about a $100-150 "mini pc". They use 2-3 year old processors for the most part, so upcoming new tech isn't really a concern.

Sigh, maybe I'm not making myself clear.

There is a app or channel you can add to Roku (the standalone boxes have USB and Micro-SD card ports) to access external media like hard drives.

https://support.roku.com/article/230160368

Build an RPi to run PiHole to block ads for your entire network.  That's the best way to get rid of ads as it eliminates browser or app differences since it blocks the URLs and you can manage the white/black lists yourself.

Buy an RPi 3 and install/configure Pi-Hole: https://pi-hole.net/

If you want to roll your own solution, then don't worry as much about the hardware as the software is the key and ultimately that's what led me to Roku over Kodi or similar.  They just couldn't match them for quality or ease of use.  Just me though.

PiHole won't block embedded ads in YouTube. I believe that has to be done at the browser level.

Keith Tanner said:

PiHole won't block embedded ads in YouTube. I believe that has to be done at the browser level.

Crap.  You're right.  I don't watch a lot of Youtube anymore, except on my PC.  Searching the PiHole subreddit shows a lot of workarounds that haven't been proven to work.

Ads aren't usually a big deal, but they really cranked it up lately and there isn't a lot of sanity being applied to it.

Of course paying for YT premium solves some of this, but this may not be a choice for everyone.

I guess maybe I wasn't clear. The RPi stuff is interesting but beyond the effort level for what I want (even if it is easy I have no experience with it and want something simple and plug and play). I really just want advice on what hardware I need to stream (potentially 4K) movies and youtube. I probably should have titled this "4K hardware requirements" or similar.

dps214 said:

I guess maybe I wasn't clear. The RPi stuff is interesting but beyond the effort level for what I want (even if it is easy I have no experience with it and want something simple and plug and play). I really just want advice on what hardware I need to stream (potentially 4K) movies and youtube. I probably should have titled this "4K hardware requirements" or similar.

The Mini PC thread you probably saw was my thread a few months back.

These Mini PC's are starting to come onto the secondhand market at really good prices for the horsepower they have, and with a little bit of know how you can buy a barebones one and build it the way you want with a hard drive or solid state drive.

depending on what you want to do.. I would get one with a hard drive, and then get a larger hard drive or a Solid state drive. I ended up dirtching the idea for my own needs, because i got a screaming deal on a laptop and so i'm using that as my mobile gaming platform and not build an emulator box out of my miniPC. 

they are not all equal, so understand what processor the unit you're buying has, or what CPU socket a barebones unit has.

my unit has a display port output on the back, but all of them are different. I'm not sure what would be need to watch stuff in 4K.
 

dps214 said:

I guess maybe I wasn't clear. The RPi stuff is interesting but beyond the effort level for what I want (even if it is easy I have no experience with it and want something simple and plug and play). I really just want advice on what hardware I need to stream (potentially 4K) movies and youtube. I probably should have titled this "4K hardware requirements" or similar.

Uh, Rpi is plug and play.  Its literally a single board computer.  Remove from package, install in case, load OS on SD card, plug into screen/keyboard/mouse, turn on, configure as desired.

I literally have one running next to me and it can run Windows (outside of DRM, why would you do that to yourself).  I brought it online, configured the wifi and started using it as a desktop.  It boots extremely quickly, runs Chrome or Firefox among other browsers, etc.  Lots of info on using/configuring Raspbian Linux among other OS options.  I just don't have a use for it yet.

If you're more comfy with more or less standard PC stuff, then by all means go that route.  Streaming generally uses more CPU instead of GPU with the available bandwidth being the main decider for frame rate/quality, while watching hard drive based content is likely to use more GPU and RAM since the spinning platters slows data transfer rates and VLC, etc. needs to cache more in RAM.  So for your needs, you'll want to find a system that's a bit more balanced in performance.