I use a raspberry pi 3 A+. The only thing that sucks is no h265 support.

I've just set up Jellyfin on an Intel NUC with a Celeron J4025, 8GB ram and 1TB ssd and it works flawlessly, can handle at least 3 4k (hardware accelerated) transcodes (didn't test with more). No tone mapping tho, its pretty slow. The thing cost me around 140 eur.

If you really want tone mapping and don't have the budget/space for a dgpu I heard the Intel N100/N150 mini pcs (like you picked) are great. I would be a little worried about the ram tho.

ASUS NUC’s are great for simple self hosting needs, got a 13th gen NUC myself with an i7, Proxmox as the host with a headless Debian 13 VM for a virtualized environment.

an old laptop if you have one first, then one of them intel nucs. intel is better a trancoding or some such thing.

The mini PC you ask about might lack a bit of RAM and SSD but I think it's good enough for how you plan to use it. The only drawback I see here depending on how you plan to use it, is that if you don't have another device on which you can store your media you will be short on storage very quick.

I recently bought a cheap NAS for storage + a mini PC to stream medias to my local devices through jellyfin and couldn't be happier. If you can look the geekom air12 lite mini PC with the N150 CPU, it's what I got, havent had much trouble to set it up and it's cheap for what it offers imo.

Another advice : ask yourself if you think your setup will evolve in the future and try to imagine how you want it to evolve, if your solution isn't adjustable enough you might have a hard time changing every part of your setup and do it all again.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-m1s-with-4gbyte-ram/

I've been using the original m1 running a lineage OS based android TV for a couple years. It's perfect. I added a nvme drive for a "DVR" in tivimate, but we rarely use it. I use a cheapo 2.4ghz remote from Amazon.

Look on eBay for USFF PCs. They're mini computers the size of paperback books that are designed for use in large organisations, and they're made by the usual suspects - HP and Dell mostly. Because they get replaced regularly they're cheap but they're just regular desktop PC hardware. A ten year old i5 can handle being a 4K media centre no problem and can be had for €/£/$70.

Got myself a NUC11 with Intel Celeron N5105. Could've installed the good old Debian, but wanted something a little more exciting, so went with OpenSUSE Leap 16 Beta instead.

I used this Beelink as a steam OS machine, I'm sure it could handle streaming.

https://www.komplett.no/product/1324158/pc-tilbehoer/stasjonaer-pc/asus-nuc-14-essential-n150

Vi bruker mengder av disse som avspillere for infoskjermer. Har brukt intel sine også, kjørt linux på de siden 2016.

If you have an android TV, there's a Jellyfin app for TV on there. Otherwise we use a Chromecast with Google TV dongle/remote that works pretty well.

I scored an embedded box 3000 we use in the bedroom

A laptop.