For proprietary streaming apps where I want to be able to see what’s going on because I’m allowed a higher resolution than a 720p blurry mess? Apple’s TVos seems pretty great. Zero ads, smooth, devices are overpowered for watching just TV. It does have apps for Jellyfin and Plex though I’d have to suggest infuse instead which is a $12 annual subscription for 4k or any proprietary audio codecs but it does work pretty well.

For everything else some version of libelec or corelec depending on the device in question it’s being installed on. There are also external launchers that keep Android but remove most of the problems.

If you want plug and it works then AppleTV. If you’re interested in putting in some work maybe a custom launcher on an android install. Beyond that libelec, coreleck, and Kodi.

Kodi maintains a big csv list of hardware (and software) with capabilities and suggestions here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=376035

Dust, fingerprints, etc.

Allegedly they may check these things under black lights at the factory for any evidence of opening to attempt to deny warranty. With drive prices having doubled since I bought it and all capacity bought out they’d be extra eager to find any excuse to attempt to deny. Magnuson–Moss warranty act should prevent them from doing that but I don’t have a high power law firm on retainer to sue and intimidate western digital into compliance if they tell me to pound dirt.

Thanks for the kind offer.

Funnily enough I have a WD HDD enclosure that I shucked a drive from not too long ago. I do recall someone mentioning the circuit boards on those being functional as a USB to SATA bridge but I suppose I presumed they need mains power and didn’t want the extra mess. That and I guess I wanted to keep the one I had pristine in case I need to RMA after putting it back together again as I’ve heard people have real mixed experience with RMAing shucked drives and with prices the way they are well I’d rather not take chances given I’ve only the one.

You don’t understand.

The alternative to device based private attestation which is what this is or could be part of is constant online verification by Palantir.

Is every time you want to view porn or adult content you have to verify your real identity so evil corporations and the government who pays them know exactly what your fetishes are and can blackmail you. So they know exactly what you’re posting online because you have to face-scan and ID-scan to set up an email account, a social media account, any account with anything that allows posting content online. Is training the population not to enter a date for their kids or themselves when setting up a computer or device account for the first time, once but upon demand scan their face, scan their ID, comply, sit meekly in fear because everything they do online is known.

What does this know? Your birthday. That’s nothing. As it stands it you can enter anything you want. Fight them when they come to add a verification system to this and point out parents would be in a position to set this up for their kids anyways and its just spying. Fight on stronger ground.

We’ve already lost the maximalist position. The internet scanning and ID verification has already been enacted in several states and countries and we risk a world where it becomes the norm and hosting companies drop anyone who doesn’t implement it because they’re made liable as well. This stuff won’t be repealed. People don’t live in democracies. They live in a dictatorship of the wealthy and the corporations. Your dissent doesn’t matter and it cannot reach most tech illiterate people who have far more pressing concerns than to riot over this.

This is a compromise solution and I wish more people would see it. If you can bend you don’t break. If you don’t bend and your enemy is the government they are stronger than you and they will snap you like a twig.

Linux desktop market share is too small to matter. And if you make this push fail then the only alternative, the only viable solution these politicians who are being cajoled and urged to implement this will see is online live-scan face and ID verification and it’ll sweep everything. You’ll have destroyed the internet and having saved Linux won’t matter. After that it’ll be a quick move to ban encryption that the government cannot break and ISPs will block traffic they can’t inspect. Game over. A simple maneuver from the place you force them to by refusing to cooperate and enact this compromise, privacy-preserving solution. We need strong defensible positions to protect privacy and the internet and free software and to understand that the old ways have been lost, they’ve died, they’ve been strangled and a compromise position must be taken up to endure and avoid a total loss.

All that would happen absolute worst case scenario if MS breaks this is your users would get a whining complaint about not being activated. Get a small “Activate Windows” logo stuck in the lower right hand of their screen and would lose the ability to change wallpapers, customize windows colors, etc.

To be clear it wouldn’t break the install and it would leave it in a state in which you could use an updated version of MAS (reminder MAS supports multiple activation options) to fix it remotely.

If you’re going intel you can check the ark.intel pages for the processors in the devices you’re looking at. Intel does pretty good documentation so it’ll show you what integrated graphics they have and all that.

Ideally you want a chip that can do hardware decoding (and if possible encoding if you’re serving media to others and intend for it to transcode and not direct-play) of common codecs so you’re not eating a massive power bill or generating tons of heat or getting bogged down in resource utilization.

AV1 support is the only tricky part when it comes to hardware decode support. Maybe you don’t use it yourself but typically only the newer chips support hardware decode of AV1 files. Something to consider if that’s likely to be an issue for you if you have or plan to have lots of AV1 encoded files. (Though there is software decode of course)

The Intel N150 can do a 4K desktop, you won’t be doing 4k gaming on it at all but it can do the desktop and video playback and is a low power consumption chipset. Should be able to support at least 2-3 4k transcodes as well. A lot of enthusiasts use it for just this purpose in fact and it’s fairly snappy for uses like these.

Anything more powerful than an N150 will be fine as well for 4K video viewing, transcoding, 4k desktop, etc. So if you want to spend more and get a more powerful Intel chip you can. Just avoid 13/14th generation i series (i5/i7/i9) especially used because of the hardware damage bad design did to those and there are a lot of messed up ones floating around from people trying to offload.

144hz may be the really tricky part. Lots of these mini boxes are capped at 60hz so definitely double-check that. There’s always the option of displayport to HDMI cables too if it has a DP output that supports the necessary 4k framerate. N150 might struggle driving that to be honest.

Oh and be aware of thermal throttling. Lots of manufacturers stuff Ultra 9 series in things like laptops and minis with inadequate cooling and they thermal throttle like crazy so you pay $800 and get something with the same performance as a properly cooled Ultra 7 or 5 series.

To loop back around to whether you need a dedicated GPU. You have to ask yourself are you transcoding streams for others or is it mostly direct-play without transcode? Integrated GPU on the CPU die should be good enough unless you have an awful lot of streams going at once or some other pressing need.

You can run whatever distro you want. There are extremely specialized distros like OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) which is basically kind of like Kodi running on Debian but without a desktop environment (extremely media center focused).

Resident Evil (2002)