TechAdmin
I swapped out delta fan a few months after release, agree fairly straightforward. Upgraded the nvme ssd to 1tb sometime before replacing with OLED model.
I'd recommend using distro you know best and/or most prefer to work with. I use the flatpak install of Jellyfin Media Player but there are also deb files available.
I'm currently using minipc with Intel n5105 (or something similar) for 1080p HTPC. Debian 12 OS with auto-login & Jellyfin Media Player starting at login. I control it with pepper jobs RF remote but also have a logitech wireless keyboard+touchpad for it. Keyboard+touchpad come in handy when browsing media sites on firefox but some might restrict quality. Some of the newer minipc's I tried required adding backports repo to install newer kernel for wifi to work. I had been playing with Debian a lot when I set up first one & been using clonezilla to image them so it's stuck.
Ordered a gmtek n97 minipc to play with and should have it in about a week. Going to test it out with 4k but it's not a deal breaker for me if it cannot handle that well enough.
I think it's because Steam compresses the data before sending it and limits CPU usage. I still use local file transfer between desktop and Steam Deck because rarely in much of a rush.
Yep, asking for something I'm sure a lot of us would love to have, a ready to go TV remote control style usage, but rather than having discussions about why those options aren't viable just downvoting.
Create a backup image from the working SD card. Write that backup image to a spare SD card and verify it works. Then try to do 'apt update' and see if anything breaks. If it breaks you got a spare SD card ready to go :)
I had issues with DNS checks and traced it to my pihole. I changed that container's resolv.conf to use cloudflare DNS and it has been working fine since. It was with Caddy so needed to change over to use IPs.
Another thing to remember is the client needs to support decoding the video in hardware or have enough CPU to handle it in software. I have intel i7 (3rd gen) with no hardware HEVC/x265 support but it has enough CPU to power through.
2X speed was impressive for the time too :)
I've had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It's not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.
I've always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I'm used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I'd still verify.
The 2X part means the DVD drive could read DVDs at up to 2X speed
Quick way to check if a program is using hardware video acceleration is with a gpu top utility.
Intel - intel_gpu_top
Nvidia - nvidia-smi / nvtop
AMD - radeontop / nvtop / amdgpu_top (just did quick search, don't have any AMD powered on to verify)