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?

    • Jedrax@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 years ago

      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.

  • Jedrax@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • onlooker@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • Jedrax@lemmy.ml
        2·
        3 years ago

        I would go with the RPi 4 over the Rock64, but it’s entirely personal preference.

      • Arcadius@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 years ago

        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.

  • ericbuijs@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    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.