Budget is about 200 for everything including storage. It lives on a bookshelf in the living room so noise matters, and it needs to be on all the time. Usually one stream direct playing to a TV, occasionally a second stream to a phone on cellular which means real transcoding. I already own a Pi power supply and a case from an old project, which is honestly the only thing pulling me toward the Pi.
The power argument gets used to justify the Pi more than the numbers support. A Pi 5 idles around 4W, an N100 box around 7 to 10W. Call it 5W of difference, which at typical residential rates is somewhere near 6 to 10 a year. That is not the deciding factor for a machine you will keep for five years.
The real difference is what happens under load. The Pi transcoding sits pinned at high power and still fails, the mini PC finishes the job in seconds and drops back to idle. Energy per unit of work is the honest comparison and the Pi loses that one here.
Noise: most small office machines have a single quiet fan that never spins up for this workload, but the ones with a spinning hard disk still inside are audible in a quiet room. Pull the disk when it arrives and put in an SSD. Ten minute job with one screwdriver, and it is the difference between a bookshelf machine you forget about and one that annoys you every evening.
Counterpoint for the Pi, since nobody has made it: if your library is already in a format your clients handle natively, direct play is the norm and the Pi 5 with NVMe is genuinely lovely. Silent, tiny, boots in seconds. I ran exactly that for two years. I only moved because a family member started watching on a work laptop that could not handle anything.
This matches my experience. The Pi was fine right up until it was not, and by then I owned a shelf full of Pi specific accessories arguing with me about switching.
@reverse_proxy_ro · 2mo ago · 3 replies
Mini PC, and it is not close once you said transcoding.
A used office machine with an 8th gen or newer Intel chip, or a new N100 box, gives you QuickSync. That handles four or five simultaneous 1080p transcodes without the fan even noticing. The Pi 5 has no usable hardware encoder for this job, so every transcode is software, and one 1080p software transcode will eat the whole board and still stutter.
Money wise: a small office desktop with 8GB and a modest SSD goes for 90 to 130 depending on how patient you are, which leaves room for a drive. A Pi 5 plus NVMe hat plus SSD plus cooler is roughly the same money for less machine.
The Pi wins if and only if everything direct plays forever, which stops being true the first time someone watches from a phone on a train.
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@logfile_lena · 2mo ago
Agreed, with a caveat about used machines: check it takes a 2.5 inch drive or has a second M.2 slot before you buy. Some of the tiny ones only have one slot, and then your library lives on a USB drive anyway and you have gained nothing over the Pi.
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@yaml_yeoman · 2mo ago
Also worth setting the client apps to direct play where possible. Half the transcodes people blame on hardware are actually subtitle burn in, which you avoid by keeping subtitles as a separate track rather than baked into the file.
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