Computer

Unsubscribe and create your own Netflix with these MiniPCs

Today we have gone from the era of screen sharing in the living room to each of us having our own personal screen. If you have a good collection of movies, series, documentaries and others accumulated over the years. What better than sharing them with who you love the most and share your life with?

Why choose a Mini PC for our Home Netflix?

The safest thing is that you are wondering if it is worth buying a complete computer to dedicate it to this task, obviously if we are talking about a gaming computer of several thousand euros and with top-of-the-range components, as if the idea does not work. But if we take into account all the monthly subscriptions to be paid for several years of the duration of one of these services, then the use of a MiniPC for a Home Netflix is ​​not such a bad idea. Obviously, we are not going to tell you where to get the content, that is up to you.

Plex Media Server as a base

In any case, what we are not looking for is not a multimedia center to play movies, but also a device that has the ability to broadcast that content to the rest of the house and even if it can be done online. This process is called transcoding and to ensure that the remote viewer receives the content without latency of any kind, what is done is to convert the video that the other user wants to see remotely from another screen in real time. Obviously, for this we are going to need powerful hardware to take care of it, but also the right software and the best option for this is Plex Media Server.

Plex Media Server Homemade Netflix

Which will not only allow us to browse our catalog of titles as if it were the interface of Netflix, HBO, Disney+ and others, but it is also multi-platform in the sense that you will be able to access the content from any other device at home that has the application correspondingly, also directly. Of course, the more systems you have connected, the more powerful the MiniPC processor will be. In any case, we have focused this on providing service at home, mostly because of the legal consequences of broadcasting without permission.

transcoding

When it comes to playing video from the MiniPC itself connected to a screen, there’s no secret, the hardware has a video codec that will allow you to play the content in H.264 or HEVC formats without the involvement of the processor. It is when we need to play video to other devices that we have to look for the processor to have a certain power. Which is marked as follows to transcode to Full HD.

Origin Resolution Format bit rate passmark Time movie or series
4KHDR HEVC 50Mbps 17000 22.5GB
4K SDR HEVC 40Mbps 12000 18GB
Full HD H.264 10Mbps 2000 4.5GB

Obviously, not all of our content will be at 4KHDR or SDRFor example, we may have series in Full HD format that we want to broadcast, but in this case it is best to go for the best possible CPU in a MiniPC without it taking off in terms of price. We have to start from the fact that thanks to transcoding we forget to have several versions of the same content stored in different resolutions and formats. Remember that our goal is to be able to transmit all our content over the network to other devices.

What MiniPC to buy to be able to have our homemade Netflix?

Since we don’t know what television you have at home, we have decided to opt for those with a CPU that scores 17,000 points in the Passmark benchmark, mainly due to the fact that we do not know if you have a 4K television with HDR and it is better that we have excess power than not we miss However, not all of us have a television with these characteristics at home, so we have decided to opt for three different models.

For users of a 4K HDR or SDR TV

In this case, we must go for the 8-core configurations, which is why we have thought of MiniPCs with a Core i7 or a Ryzen 7 of the most recent generations over time. Specifically, our choice is a model of MinisForum with an AMD Ryzen 7 4800U CPUwhich gets 17,000 points in Passmark and is also accompanied by 32 GB of RAM and 512 GB SSD expandable. This, together with its connectivity options, make it ideal for mounting your homemade Netflix together with your 4K HDR television.

If your television, on the other hand, is Full HD

In the event that your television is Full HD, then you will have to convert all the content of higher resolutions to Full HD before sending it to the storage unit. However, the loss in image quality is doubly outweighed by needing only 2000 Passmark performance points and requiring very little power to play and transcode at the same time.

For us the best option in this case is the Geekom MiniPC with an i3-8109U, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. Your CPU has plenty of power for what we want to use it for. So you will not be limited in this aspect, but yes, only if you have a Full HD television where you will connect this MiniPC for your homemade Netflix.

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