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
    2•6 months ago

    I have a very similar setup like you. A NUC is providing NAS functionality and is running 24/7. An AppleTV is connected to the projector and has all the apps I need for consuming media (Jellyfin, Netflix, etc.). The NAS is running OG Debian with SMB, Jellyfin and even NFS for easy access.

    The NUC provides additional features like synching and a few other things.

    Why the AppleTV? Because I had Raspis, FireTVs, PCs, and whatnot connected to the projector and the AppleTV is hands down the most convenient one. The UI is super reduced and simple. The remote works. You can get just about every app you might need. And maintainance is basically zero.

      • @[email protected]English
        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.

        • @[email protected]English
          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

      • 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.