

I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.
The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).
My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.
I think
mplayer
has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believeyoutube-dl
can output to stdout.The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.