Yeah, transcoding entirely off - directly stream stored 720/1080p files (downloaded like that, although I did use handbrake on the pi once to transcode Space 1999 season 1. Took about 2 days I think).

Someone else was just talking about Wyse thin clients. I’m fairly sure that a $40 Wyse thin client out performs even the best Pi 4 (maybe 5 sometimes). If I can’t find a way to fix mine, I may have to buy a few for uh…science. IIRC, they idle at about the same as the Pi

Oh man I love those wyze thin clients. They can’t go for much more that $40 these days.

I hope people keep sleeping on em - I could use a Raspberry Pi replacement or two

It’s very ok, as long as you don’t expect multiple 4K streams at it.

I ran JellyFin on a Pi 4 for about 3 or 4 yrs before it started acting up. So long as you don’t transcode, it works wonderfully well. I had it serving upto 4-5 x 720p streams at same time. IIRC, it can just about do a single 4K, 60? Never tried - all my media is 1080p or less.

IIRC, mine is overclocked and undervolted using PiTools (and is in a Argon 40 case with a m.2). The Argon 40 case (I think) is causing it to short (something with the daughter-board? Dunno). Better options these days.

Paperless I don’t use but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible.

Don’t try Immich unless you like pain (or turn off the AI stuff)

I actually (just last night) abliterated a Qwen3.5-2B for this sort of purpose (well, more specifically, to fit neatly into a socket for a project). It’s fast and light, cooked for edge devices, and should have inherited all of base Qwen’s tricks (~200 languages, vision etc) polaris-heretic-Q4_K_M-GGUF

Try it and see if it works? I inadvertently made it really fucking love dotpoints (GPT-OSS 20B disease) so am trying to unfuck it right now.

Else - I can recommend something like Granite-4H or the old Qwen3-4B 2507 instruct

granite-4.1-3b-heretic.i1-Q4_K_M

Qwen3-4B 2507 instruct

Don’tBe Evil

Since you posted this last, Google did the dirty and U2’ed Gemini into chrome without user’s permission.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/chrome-is-quietly-downloading-4gb-ai-model-without-your-permission

So, “positioning and walled garden” rather than “for the good of all man kind” seems to be the play here. ICBW and YMMV.