Hi!
First time user here.
I have tried out ersatzTV a little using a docker image running on my ds920+. It seems to work well enough. But I can't get local files to be found (I only managed to get media files from the JellyfinAPI) and I quickly saw that transcoding even to a single measly 480p stream took up most of my little NAS's processing power because it can't do hardware accelleration.
To be honest, I wasn't planning on running it there long term anyways. It is a bit underpowered and I am already running Jellyfin and other things on it. So I have been thinking of offloading these things to a separate machine and letting the NAS concentrate on doing its NAS things.
So I am now looking around for a small-ish computer I can put some appropriate form of Linux on so I can have it run Jellyfin, ersatzTV, Homeassistant and whatever tinkering I may think of for a while ahead. IT doesn't need to have a full desktop experience, so to speak. I'm expecting to treat it as just a box connected to the local network, no gaming expected either. Just 1080p streams at maximum 30 fps.
As I have been looking around. I have been looking at Raspberry Pi's.. They are starting to get some good power going. But, If I understand things right, whatever hardware encoding the platform used to have has been discontinued. So maybe this is not the use case for this.
I have also been looking at Intel NUC-machines. They seem to be readily available. They are smallish boxes. I guess they have the hardware accelleration I need. But. I have noticed that the cheaper ones are based on something called the N-Series CPU instead of the more common i5 and i7.
So. I am curious. If anyone here has any experience with those machines. Can I get an appropriate Linux on it (if so, specify which), can I run ersatzTV on the N-series CPU's and can I expect to get hardware accellerated Decoding and Encoding to work with that hardware?
I see there are older NUC's also that are running on the more regular i5 and i7. Anything I should look out for if I decide to go down that route?
I am trying to keep things cheap/affordable, yet somewhat capable. So, at the moment I am not expecting to build a full server tower for this.