Thanks to the Raspberry Pi, we have easy access to extremely inexpensive machines running Linux that have all kinds of GPIO as well as various networking protocols. And as the platform has improved over the years, we’ve seen more demanding applications on them as well as applications that use an incredibly small amount of power. This project combines all of these improvements and implements a media streaming server on a Raspberry Pi that uses a tiny amount of energy, something that wouldn’t have been possible on the first generations of Pi.

Part of the reason this server uses such low power, coming in just around two watts, is that it’s based on the Pi Zero 2W. It’s running a piece of software called Mini-Pi Media Server which turns the Pi into a DLNA server capable of streaming media over the network, in this case WiFi. Samba is used to share files and Cockpit is onboard for easy web administration. In testing, the server was capable of streaming video to four different wireless devices simultaneously, all while plugged in to a small USB power supply.

For anyone who wants to try this out, the files for it as well as instructions are also available on a GitHub page. We could think of a number of ways that this would be useful over a more traditional streaming setup, specifically in situations where power demand must remain low such as on a long car trip or while off grid. We also don’t imagine the Pi will be doing much transcoding or streaming of 4K videos with its power and processing limitations, but it would be unreasonable to expect it to do so. For that you’d need something more powerful.

Thanks to [Richard] for the tip!