Your old laptop & a generic bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo unit.
That is my setup. :)
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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I use a Raspberry Pi 5 with LibreELEC
That is pretty expensive nowadays, if OP wants to go that expensive, getting a mini PC with the latest intel N150. The pi 5 doesn't even have hardware AV1 decoding. By the time you have all of the pi accessories, it is not much of a price difference, but defi itely a performance difference.
Plus you get benefits like actual storage instead of a separately bought SD card, more RAM, 2.5G ethernet, and HDMI2.1 & USB–C displayport.
Then you slap Linux on it (and also hope that plasma bigscreen is a success in the near future) and you have a very reliable 4K HTPC that can decode anything you throw at it. It has enough horsepower to be a home server at the same time, unlike a pi while also having just a bit higher idle power usage (2W or so).
same here, with NVMe-Board
Thx for the tip!
Honestly I’ve got the kids bedroom tv on a Pi 3 running LibrElec just fine. Kodi isn’t that resource intensive so it works great. But if you’re feeling fancy setting up a db to hold all your info so you can share it on multiple end really is nice. I love being able to stop a movie in the living room because I’m getting tired and pick it up in the bedroom at the exact same spot.
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If you ever want to buy raspberry pi, don't forget to get a cooler either passive or active. Those things gets hot quickly without a cooler.
Literally anything can be a streaming target. You don't need a full on PC. RPi works well.
I use RPi5 for this and have it hooked up to steam link.
can stream at 4k with no issue.
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.
Thx for the tip!
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.
Keep an eye on the HDMI version - 1.4 will only give you 30fps at 4k. You need 2.0 to get 60fps.
Great tip, thanks!
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.
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Dell Optiplex 3050
Lenovo m720
HP whatever with a 7th gen Intel
All can be had for $50 ish
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.
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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
I'll double the Beelink recco. Using a SER5 for a few years now as dual boot windows and linux as an HTPC. Zero issues with PC at 4k and 5.1. My only issue is Dirac doesn't support linux, but that is neither here nor there.
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 a Pi running LibreElec and it can be controlled by my LG TV down the HDMI cable. It's the CEC protocol. Look into that.
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Why not just use a bluetooth or 2.4g remote?
Intel NUCs typically have an IR receiver
I've tried Kodi on librelec, the old Xbox launcher. It has an app called kodi remote: your phone is the remote.
Currently I'm using an old 2013 laptop with Debian and xfce. I've installed KDE connect on it, and it also has an app KDE connect that turns your phone into the remote.
The main advantage of the remote on your phone is you can type text, copy/paste URLs, passwords and whatnot
An Airmouse is a gamechanger.
Its a TV-remote-style device that works like a Wii remote to control the mouse, usually has a keyboard on the backside, and connects to a USB 2.4ghz or Bluetooth receiver depending on the model you get.
I got a $20 Rii and a $10 other brand one to try out. Both are fine. I like the buttons on the Rii better but it has no backlight which sucks because I'm usually watching TV in bed at 9pm. The $10 one's keyboard also responds faster so I can actually speed type.
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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 share the general sentiment but lower TDP does not equal lower consumption, any "mobile" ryzen since the series 4000 on Zen 2 (7nm) is more efficient at most tasks than an N100 (10nm TSMC node), and barring specific mobo issues all have in general very low idle consumptions. But their iGPUs are a lot more capable, faster at anything, no need to limit yourself to a lightweight Desktop manager. Shop used and you might get more bang for your buck with an older ryzen mini pc than a newer N100 one.
If the thing is not meant to use as a Desktop, why load it with heavier applications that aren't delivering anything useful?
No matter how efficient a core is at most tasks, it can't beat the power savings of not actually running needless code.
My homemade TV Box isn't running a lightweight desktop because I had to "limit myself", it's running one because I'm not losing anything by not having that which I don't use and if that even just saves a few Watts a week, it still means I'm better off, which is satisfying as I like to design my systems to be efficient.
For fancy Linux Desktop things I have an actual Desktop PC with Linux - the homemade TV Box on my living room is only supposed to let me watch stuff on TV whilst I sit on my sofa.
Further, there are more than one form of efficiency - stuff like the N100 (and even more, the ARM stuff) are designed for power consumption efficiency, whilst desktop CPUs are designed for ops-per-cycle efficiency, which are not at all the same thing: being capable of doing more operations per cycle doesn't mean something will consume less power in doing so (in fact, generally in Engineering if you optimize in one axis you lose in another) it just means it can reach the end of the task in fewer cycles.
For a device that during peak use still runs at around 10% CPU usage, having the ability to do things a little faster doesn't really add any value.
Even the series 4000 Zen2 being more optimized for power consumption is only in the context of desktop computers, a whole different world from what the N100 (and even more things like ARM7) were designed to operate in, which is why the former has a TDP of 140W and the latter of 15W (and the ARMs are around 6W). Sure the TDP is a maximum and hence not a precise metric for a specific use case such as using something as a TV Box, but it's a pretty good indication of how much a core was optimized for power consumption, and 15W vs 140W is a pretty massive distance to expect that any error in using TDP to estimate how the power consumption of those two in everyday use as a TV Box compares would mean that the CPU with 140W TDP consumes less than the one with 15W.
PS: All that said, if the use case was "selfhosting" rather than "TV Box (with a handful of lightweight services on the side)", you suggestion makes more sense, IMHO.
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I was in a similar boat. I've been using a Ryzen 5000-based mini PC for about two years now. It's running:
Debian for stability
Flex Launcher for the 10ft TV UI
Flex Launcher has shortcuts for Plex HTPC, Netflix in a full screen Chrome page, etc.
An AirMouse Remote with a keyboard on the back and basic controls up front. It has 5 programmable IR buttons that I have bound to TV Power, TV Input, TV Select, and Sound Bar Vol-/+
My kids also use it for Steam and Retro gaming, so I have it launch ES-DE and Steam Big Picture Mode from Flex Launcher.
Other than the occasional tweaking, it has needed very little and been rock solid for about 2 years now. I have a cheap Android TV set top box still attached for when Grandma goes to use the TV. I can switch inputs and hand them the Google TV remote, but my wife, my kids, and I use the HTPC almost exclusively.
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 a raspberry pi 3 A+. The only thing that sucks is no h265 support.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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