Hi! My goal: I want to set up a beamer projector in my flat and connect that to some kind of ‘always on’ machine with which I can stream (currently Netflix a bit but that really is not a priority as I am thinking of cancelling it) but would also like it to be a torrent client (I have a VPN) to download some media. Though something like popcorn time would also be nice, though that’s also something that I would only use behind a vpn for obvious reasons.

I have a pi5 or and some older NUCs hanging around that run well with Ubuntu. I know that something like kodi does not play nice with Netflix (iirc because of drm).

Should I use the pi? Or better an Ubuntu and do the power management best I can myself?

What would you guys say is a good way to try this out?

Edit: TIL I thought beamer is a word that German borrows from English, so I assumed it’s the same. Nope, in German ‘beamer’ has very weird roots (https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoprojektor) so Germany stole an English word ‘beam’ but it meant project… Weird

    • BobbyTablesEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Just external - I know it’s not the best solution. My setup grew on a tight budget over the last 10 years and for me it was the easiest, most affordable, and extendable/replaceable way. I don’t need super fast drives in my home and I don’t need backups for most of the data stored on a media server. So it kind of is just a bunch of disks with a NUC.

      The internal drive for the system is an SSD though. Came with the computer.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I do it like that.
      8TB external drive on an 11th i5 gen nuc.
      Almost every service is dockerized because I can’t be bothered to manage the dependencies.

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        I’ve just been looking for a future solution when I retire my desktop. I wanted a lower power PC like a NUC but I currently have 9 or 10 HDDs in the PC which won’t work as a bunch of external enclosures and a NAS would be not worth the money for this many drives.

        Maybe I’ll just get an i5 with QuickSync and an ITX or micro ATX for the next revision