For the past 25 years of sailing the high seas I’ve always used my PC for watching whatever. But as this is not always practical, I am looking to connect a raspberry Pi to my TV to have a setup with smaller fingerprint and larger screen.
I briefly tried one a couple of eons ago (2010ish?), but sadly I don’t remember the name.
Requirements:
- Must be able to run from a raspberry pi
- Must be able to stream media over my network (protocols aren’t that important as I can probably spin up whatever is needed. Preferably I would just have it index a couple of NFS mounts and local drives)
Bonus question: Which Pi model would you recommend running this? I have a bunch of Zero W, and while everything “works” on them, it simply wasn’t powerful enough to decode video at a watchable rate.
OK maybe not any old PC. But I think pretty much any 8th gen Intel processor or higher will do it without a GPU. I run it on an N100 right now and it works very well for hardware transcoding.
An N100 isn’t “without a GPU;” it’s got Intel UHD Graphics built in – moreover, even though it’s a pretty cheap chip it’s also a pretty new one, and thus supports recent video codecs.
Meanwhile, my AMD Ryzen 5 3600 does not work for transcoding, even though it’s way faster than an N100, because it’s not an APU.
You’ve only proven my point that having a GPU with hardware transcoding support is what makes all the difference.
OK OK, I meant without a discrete GPU.