Intel Compute Stick is probably exactly what you're describing. I've never tried one so I don't know how powerful they are, but using older Atom chips I've never been blown away by them. You might want to spend the extra money and get the Core m5.
A bit bigger but also more powerful is their NUC boards. You could probably just tape one of those to the back of your TV to keep it out of view.
dont bother with a micro pc or silent fans or any bullshit like that, just makes the comp more expensive and have worse specs
take a regular gaming pc, put it on the other side of a wall
run an hdmi cable through the wall to the tv
with cat5 to usb adapters run a usb cable from the pc to near where you park your ass, mount a sweet industrial usb hub somewhere near your chair to plug in your headphones and controllers because wireless game controllers suck
if you want to get super fancy you can add big ass speakers and a receiver into the mix but a lot of pc games dont support surround sound but its cool for movies
if you cant drill holes in the wall like in an apartment or something the buy/build a cabinet to hide the pc (make sure you have good airflow)
Or if you have a TV cabinet type thing then you can buy low-height cases that somewhat resemble DVD players.
Of course if you want a true gaming PC then the low height makes it difficult to install a decent heatsink, but as long as you're not overclocking or care about maxing out your boost clocks, there are decent low-height options. Or you can do what I did and put a Lian Li TU150 on its side by drilling some new screw holes for the feet :P
You can do all sorts of stuff to blend in a computer with your living room setup but I can't think of a good reason to have the computer in the same room as the TV. We aren't switching CDs anymore.
Only if you are living somewhere you can't drill walls, even then you can clip door corners and run the cable along the ceiling edge. If you are doing an install job for someone with more money than sense then do whatever, spend a ton making a comp pretty and quiet and take your cut of the hardware.
Well, I already had a cabinet with a bunch of empty space in it, which the TV is sitting on. If I were to start from scratch then I would probably wall-mount the TV to save a bit of space, but as things stand it was a logical place to put the PC.
If I had to think of an actual advantage it would probably be receptivity, I have the wireless keyboard you mentioned and the touchpad starts to malfunction if there's too much stuff in between it and the wireless receiver. I also have Bluetooth headphones with a similar issue (though I'm hoping Bluetooth 5.2 will solve that problem at some point, with its new audio codec and increased range).
Is the only purpose going to be playing videos from the NAS? If so, it might be simpler to run plex on the NAS (or Jellyfin, that's the open source plex competitor, but I haven't used it so I don't know how good it is), as long as the NAS has a good enough CPU. Then you could just stream to a chromecast.
If that's not an option, then a NUC is probably your best choice.
copypasta for you.
you can simply take the raspberry and install steamlink on it. if you exit big-picture on your pc it will stream whatever is visible on the monitor to the tv.
raspberry 4.
install raspian
openvpn to bundle all your dls so your inet still feels responsive for gaming
transmission for torrent
sonarr with jackett to automatically dl all your tv-series/anime
setup kodi on your clients with a mariadb as host on your raspberry
tvheadend with a tvcard so you got your tv/tvrecorder if you need such a thing
en.me*al-tracker.com if you listen to non-shit music
Intel Compute Stick is probably exactly what you're describing. I've never tried one so I don't know how powerful they are, but using older Atom chips I've never been blown away by them. You might want to spend the extra money and get the Core m5.
A bit bigger but also more powerful is their NUC boards. You could probably just tape one of those to the back of your TV to keep it out of view.
dont bother with a micro pc or silent fans or any bullshit like that, just makes the comp more expensive and have worse specs
take a regular gaming pc, put it on the other side of a wall
run an hdmi cable through the wall to the tv
with cat5 to usb adapters run a usb cable from the pc to near where you park your ass, mount a sweet industrial usb hub somewhere near your chair to plug in your headphones and controllers because wireless game controllers suck
get this keyboard with touchpad to control the computer
if you want to get super fancy you can add big ass speakers and a receiver into the mix but a lot of pc games dont support surround sound but its cool for movies
if you cant drill holes in the wall like in an apartment or something the buy/build a cabinet to hide the pc (make sure you have good airflow)
Or if you have a TV cabinet type thing then you can buy low-height cases that somewhat resemble DVD players.
Of course if you want a true gaming PC then the low height makes it difficult to install a decent heatsink, but as long as you're not overclocking or care about maxing out your boost clocks, there are decent low-height options. Or you can do what I did and put a Lian Li TU150 on its side by drilling some new screw holes for the feet :P
You can do all sorts of stuff to blend in a computer with your living room setup but I can't think of a good reason to have the computer in the same room as the TV. We aren't switching CDs anymore.
Only if you are living somewhere you can't drill walls, even then you can clip door corners and run the cable along the ceiling edge. If you are doing an install job for someone with more money than sense then do whatever, spend a ton making a comp pretty and quiet and take your cut of the hardware.
Well, I already had a cabinet with a bunch of empty space in it, which the TV is sitting on. If I were to start from scratch then I would probably wall-mount the TV to save a bit of space, but as things stand it was a logical place to put the PC.
If I had to think of an actual advantage it would probably be receptivity, I have the wireless keyboard you mentioned and the touchpad starts to malfunction if there's too much stuff in between it and the wireless receiver. I also have Bluetooth headphones with a similar issue (though I'm hoping Bluetooth 5.2 will solve that problem at some point, with its new audio codec and increased range).
Is the only purpose going to be playing videos from the NAS? If so, it might be simpler to run plex on the NAS (or Jellyfin, that's the open source plex competitor, but I haven't used it so I don't know how good it is), as long as the NAS has a good enough CPU. Then you could just stream to a chromecast.
If that's not an option, then a NUC is probably your best choice.
copypasta for you. you can simply take the raspberry and install steamlink on it. if you exit big-picture on your pc it will stream whatever is visible on the monitor to the tv.
raspberry 4.
You can get it done cheap with a Chromecast but you'll never regret putting a full PC to work here. I dunno what your budget is though.
I never run out of uses for my HTPC. It does everything I want, and has the flexibility for hardware upgrades if I want to push its gaming capability.