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Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

428 points by dkobran 5y ago

rhipitr 5y ago
Is there not a getting started section on this page? After skimming the linked page and comments here, it seems to be very configurable in how it runs, but besides a community forum, is there just a general setup guide for a basic use case somewhere?
vaviloff 5y ago
Wow, so much praise for Kodi, and it's well-deserved. Been using LibreELEC (which is basically a Kodi OS) on just a RPi3 for a few years now, it's a good enough client for non-smart TV to simply browse stuff from NAS with Yatse on Android. In a bare minimum case not too difficult to set up, just add a source via SFTP and you're done, no need for scanning.
thrusong 5y ago
Longtime Kodi user here. Bought an M1 MacBook Air in the spring and Kodi barely works. Video won't display even though the sound works fine, and instead the mouse will multiply thousands of time. You can move the mouse around and just leave trails of mouse cursors everywhere. It's like one out of every four times it will work as expected, but requires quitting and re-opening it over and over.
- kadoban 5y ago
  You can configure Kodi to use other video players to actually play. Probably worth doing. I do it myself because for whatever reason Kodi's player crashes like crazy on my Windows htpc.
- jaimex2 5y ago
  M1 is still new tech that is hit and miss with anything not from the walled garden. There's not enough interest to fix/develop for it.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  That's really curious considering how Kodi treats ARM targets as a first-class citizen. I'm guessing it has to do with Apple's own underlying systems?
  - danachow 5y ago
    Kodi targets low cost ARM SBCs as a first class citizen. ARM is (a family) of instruction sets - for something like a media player it is down near the least important aspect of providing support. Kodi targets a boat load of low cost embedded SoC ARM devices but these bear little resemblance to an M1 based MacBook except for the instruction set. Kodi will run fine on typical x86 PC setups because this hardware is commonly available.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      I'm aware of the difference, I just haven't quite seen the effects of ARM ISA variations in action quite yet. I was kinda under the impression that v8 would be back-compatible with v6 and v7 ARM.
      - danachow 5y ago
        Yeah and what I’m saying is that any ARM ISA variations have little to do with anything. Kodi is a C++ application primarily and uses off the shelf compilers. The support issues have more to do with hardware and OS compatibility.
  - Mayzie 5y ago
    It really doesn’t. There hasn’t been an active Android maintainer for ages at this point - it’s only just barely supported.
StockHuman 5y ago
For your consideration, Jellyfin. [0] [0] https://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/
- schemathings 5y ago
  Interesting - I bought Emby this year for serving local media - my one gripe is no thumbnails/preview when you scrub over the timeline - this one has it. Will give it a spin.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - DenseComet 5y ago
    Jellyfin is actually a fork of Emby, created after Emby went closed source.
    - seanw444 5y ago
      I wondered why the UI elements looked so similar. I had tried Emby as my first media server, and then realized there were paid features, and switched to Jellyfin.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    There's actually ongoing work on extremely efficient tooling for thumbnails/previews :)
    - schemathings 5y ago
      That's good to hear!
      - kuschku 5y ago
        For jellyfin, that is. For emby, I doubt they’ll manage to even copy the technique
psychstudio 5y ago
Been using Kodi (XBMC) for nearly 20 years. The piracy FUD surrounding XBMC a few years ago really disappointed me. We use Kodi for streaming tv (Australia) and internet radio and it is perfect for this. That's all I wanted to say really. The piracy FUD has been disappointing.
- afavour 5y ago
  It’s not really FUD in the vast majority of cases, though. Kodi is used to play pirated content the vast majority of the time. No value judgment either way by me but it’s obviously true. Same with Plex.
  - harry8 5y ago
    This is like saying cars are used to escape from bank robberies or people walk out their front doors to commit crimes. Just insane, sorry.
    - puchatek 5y ago
      Try "cars are used to commute". Still insane? No, because that's a very likely usecase. Just like playing pirated content via a media center. Now why would your reply completely ignore the actual likelihood of an event?
      - harry8 5y ago
        No it's absolutely and completely nonsense. Try "Kodi is used to manage and play video files" instead. Because (a) that is not illegal and (b) that is true. You have no idea how many people use Kodi to manage their dvds they ripped using handbrake, for example. None. Zero. You have no idea how many people use kodi for streaming Al-Jazeera news or msnbc/fox disinformation. So now you're just speculating and trying to claim a useful tool, like a car, can be used in association with an illegal act, like a bank robbery getaway car. That's it. Even if you did have actual data, which you don't, it's utterly irrelevant. There is are multiple ordinary, expected, and designed for legal uses of kodi. Kodi is being used legally, properly and ethically by a great many people. That is clear and not in dispute. Take it one step further to see it with stunning clarity. What percentage of home computers have been used in some fashion with copyrighted material where Disney et al claim they should be paid ever more and have repeatedly changed laws by paying large sums to politicians to effect that law-enforcement supported revenue increase? With no data someone claims "most home computers are used this way" and makes your comment about ignoring likelihood when called out for it. It really is just a nuts analysis and should be called as such.
rglullis 5y ago
Kodi is the perfect example of how amateurs (in the good sense of the word) can make something long-lasting and provide an alternative that is better than whatever the "industry" wants to shove down our throats.
- supertrope 5y ago
  A lot of companies have a conflict of interest between making the best software and prioritizing synergy with another division. Sony Electronics added DRM to their formats to help Columbia Pictures.
Ballu 5y ago
I used to play with these software long time back, Kodi was the last one before moving to "whatever" stick :) (And I am not into media now) But I have question regarding media, what are you going to play? Where are you going to download the movies/songs, etc unless use illegal ways. It was amazing journey of few years for me, ripping CDs, DVDs, VCDs, BluRay, HD-DVD, etc and playing all those on TV with Kodi box. (Eventually moved to WDTV box).
dakial1 5y ago
Kodi, Plex, the late Boxee are all pioneers and the pillars of what streaming services have of user experience today. I remember when I first saw Boxee interface back at the piracy-wild-west era and thought how wonderful and easy it was to watch a movie with it. I even had transmission setup on a NAS (DNS-323) automatically downloading my preferred shows that appeared without much effort on my TV. The truth is that I didn't pirate because I wanted to pay nothing for media, I did it because I wanted the streaming experience and ability to have movies available on demand, not some cumbersome physical media whose purpose was only to guarantee studios/record labels profit at the expense of my consumption experience. They didn't care about me so I didn't care about them, something that changed with the coming of Netflix, Spotify, Google Music and all others... Now I gladly pay what I consider a fair fee for their services and amazing hassle-free experience. These wouldn't have happened (as quickly at least) without the 2000's piracy world and the media platforms build around it...
jrm4 5y ago
Bit of a thread hijack, but: I'm surprised at what appears to be the lack of a simple and lightweight "10 foot interface" for Linux. You have projects like Kodi and KDE BigScreen, but (as most people are noting here) a lot of us don't need all the bells and whistles (and e.g. compositing). A 10 foot browser + filemanager + music player + movie player would probably handle it. "Mouseless" would be nice, but maybe not even that? Is this out there and a bunch of us are missing it? Basically a 10 foot openbox?
Sugimot0 5y ago
I've found https://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/ to be the best solution for my needs, but the setup is more involved.
pabs3 5y ago
Maybe after the Software Freedom Conservancy lawsuit is won, Kodi will be able to run on Vizio TVs. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
- keithah 5y ago
  The problem is the toolkit offered, more than anything else. Kodi needs lots of native code hooks into the OS, which Tizen, WebOSTV, etc don't support, or at least don't give access freely. Otherwise Kodi could be on every platform.. Most TV OS's that aren't Android TV or Roku require you to write web-based apps (unless you're Netflix or YouTube, but another story there) which abstract all the 'good stuff' out, so impossible to run Kodi on. Roku is an even worse mess (forcing you to use Brightscript, a digital signage language they bought forever go and still maintain)
  - pabs3 5y ago
    I was suggesting that instead of the pre-installed OS on Vizio TVs (which is Linux and systemd based according to the lawsuit), you could install your own OS and then run Kodi on top of that. Since Kodi already supports running on Linux, it should not be hard to do this setup once the lawsuit concludes and the code has been released and the installation procedure documented. So the platform offered by the TV doesn't matter, because you'll replace it with a normal Linux one and run whatever you want on top. For the problem of running Kodi on the web and web-ish platforms, maybe WASM is the future? There is also emscripten for converting languages normally compiled to binaries to JavaScript. For Brightscript, maybe a similar approach to emscripten would work, transpiling from other languages to Brightscript, possibly via JavaScript. Or I guess a second app based on Brightscript.
shawnk 5y ago
Isn’t this what got omi in a hellcat in trouble??
- 3np 5y ago
  By the same logic, uTorrent was what got the TPB founders in trouble.
- paradaux 5y ago
  Kodi is just the media suite, what add-ons one installs in it is neither their concern or their liability. The same goes for similar offerings like Jellyfin/Plex, if the end user uses a pirated streaming service that is on them and the service provider (which Omi was.) It was this which got him into trouble, not the fact he used Kodi.
- Brian-Puccio 5y ago
  > A flamboyant YouTuber known as Omi in a Hellcat was charged with illegally selling copyrighted TV shows and movies through an online service, prosecutors said. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/us/bill-omar-carrasquillo-charged.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/us/bill-omar-carrasquillo... So no.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Omi got Omi in trouble, kodi is a tool that can play "illegal" downloads or your family home videos and grandma's church piano concert. It doesn't care which.
- keithah 5y ago
  Omi was running an IPTV service, nothing to do with Kodi.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xfalcox 5y ago
Kodi is awesome. The fact that it can run everywhere, with such a consistent UI is a great, and I have used it in x86 HTPCs, RPI, Android TV over the years.
28uwedj 5y ago
Stremio is way better.
- zeruch 5y ago
  Why?
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > Stremio is way better. In what way?
mikeryan 5y ago
For anyone new to it, Kodi is hardly new its been around for almost 20 years now, starting life as Xbox Media Player and later Xbox Media Center. It's been pretty okay at what it does for a while now and has really been competing primarily with Plex as the place to store "your own copies of movies" and has really become the leading open source solution as Plex has become something of a commercial option.
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  And Plex started as a MacOS port of XBMC before those devs split off, completely re-wrote, and renamed it Plex. *My timeline is prolly slightly off, but those are the major plot beats.
don-code 5y ago
I used Kodi in its very early days as Xbox Media Center. XBMC turned the original-generation Xbox into a cheap and very functional media center PC - I actually didn't stop using mine until I upgraded to HD in the early 2010s. More recently, I've been running it on a Raspberry Pi 3A in my kitchen. It interacts with my DVR upstairs, so that I can pause TV there and pick it up downstairs. I credit the fact that it was originally designed to run on the Xbox as the reason it works as well as it does on even the original Raspberry Pi.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  I got an XBOX because my late father was a .NET developer and very much into Microsoft technologies so he thought the XBOX was a nifty device. The software on that device was just so lousy. I was into Squaresoft type RPGs/Nintendo 64 era Rare games and the XBOX did not deliver. Only games I ever bought for that console were Shenmue 2 and Blinx the Time sweeper. However that simple 20$ LPC mod chip opened up a world of amazing little games/emulators and tons of entertainment that made the XBOX totally memorable even 20+ years later. The device got hundreds of hours of usage that it would not have otherwise and cemented in my mind the amazing magic of homebrew software. Man I miss those years so much.
  - DrewRWx 5y ago
    Modding my XBOX using a chip my friend was forced to sell me because it got his dad banned from XBOX Live was the best thing that ever happened to me. The first SCMs I ever learned were CVS and SVN in order to mildly tweak and compile my first ever program, XBMC. It inspired me so much that in my second (or "interests") University of California admission essay I wrote at length about the experience and others like compiling and loading Rockbox on my DAP. In a happy twist, I was still offered a Regent Scholarship to a a few UC campuses. Even ones I didn't apply to.
thesausageking 5y ago
How does this compare to Plex?
- Quick2822 5y ago
  I used XBMC (and then Kodi) for many years, had it installed on AppleTV, FireTV, etc, etc but I eventually migrated fully to Plex. I found that I prefer Plex over Kodi when dealing with local media. Eventually Kodi only felt useful if you wanted to dive into the world of streaming movies and shows from various shady sources.
- jaimex2 5y ago
  Kodi is for power users, Plex is for anyone who just wants a place to host their media collection.
  - DrewRWx 5y ago
    You can mix-and-match too! Plex puts out an official Kodi plugin: https://github.com/plexinc/plex-for-kodi https://github.com/plexinc/plex-for-kodi .
    - keithah 5y ago
      Unfortunately Plex stopped caring it years ago..
- colordrops 5y ago
  Jellyfin is more like Plex. Kodi is more like Roku.
  - DrewRWx 5y ago
    - Plex is a closed source fork-and-re-write of an MacOS XBMC port that was codenamed OSXBMC. - Jellyfin is a fork of Emby at the version before it went closed source. - Emby was an open-source re-implementation of Plex. - Genealogy is weird.
- 5y ago
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I run LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi, which is a just-enough-OS for Kodi. It works great, and is even a good choice for playing music over HDMI, because unlike some other music-playing distributions, it doesn't use ALSA, and simply bit-bangs the decoded audio out of the HDMI port. Works very well.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  Indeed. It's also worth mentioning that the very inexpensive Digital TV tuner "just works" (at least in Europe) and with tvheadend you can then stream the live stream around your home network trivially. That's what the rpi4 running Kodi in our bedroom does at least. The streams are so in sync that you can listen to them on two separate devices in other bits of the house without an audio phase difference. Kodi is an amazing project and deserves much praise.
- Deukhoofd 5y ago
  I really want to like LibreElec, but the frequent crashes of the entire OS makes it hard for me to do so. A day doesn't go by that the entire system crashes on me. Connecting a bluetooth device? 50/50 chance that it crashes. Attempting to play a video that failed to play just before? Complete crash.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    Sounds like a hardware problem. Libreelec has been running on my Pi2 for literally years. The only time I had problems was when the power supply of my Pi failed. If you're running a Pi, try changing the PSU. Bad power can cause many problems that you wouldn't expect.
- swayvil 5y ago
  Ditto. Has ALL the codecs. Listening to music on it right now (Stars of the Lid).
- Smoosh 5y ago
  There's also OSMC, which is minimal Debian + Kodi.
deagle50 5y ago
First rule of fight club...
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  Don't you mean the First Rule of Open Source: "Tell your friends!"?
dave_sullivan 5y ago
The real OGs had this running on a modded original Xbox when it was still xbmc. In order to watch MST3K episodes from emule. Running CoreELEC on an odroid N2+ now, highly recommended.
- threeio 5y ago
  Keep circulating the tapes!
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  Agreed, but as one of those OGs the "real" OGs are the ones that ran it on the original Xbox when it was called XBMP.
- wallaBBB 5y ago
  I tried a bunch of things on the N2+, but I kept having to install Kodi on whatever I was running and ultimately settled on CoreELEC to keep the things simple and running. For HTPC there is really no good competing ecosystem
- tunap 5y ago
  The OGs were using Hauppage WinTV & ATI AIWs long before Xbox was released.
  - bartimus 5y ago
    MythTV. I spent so much time fiddling with it. My setup would automatically record the 1 hour block of BBC World News and transcode it to make it suitable for the PSP so I could watch it on the train to work.
bitexploder 5y ago
We have a Linux server with Samba. Kodi connects to it beautifully. Even my kids can use it fine. Combine with VM that runs a VPN and deluge for optimal fun. Add a few simple IPTables rules to prevent traffic from leaking except over your VPN to calm down annoying Torrent monitors that your ISP might use. Been working for years. We vastly prefer to pay for content, but we ancient DVD rips and such that are not amenable to the modern media tech stack.
- thejosh 5y ago
  Old: Usenet Then: Netflix/other streaming Now: Too many streaming services, back to old :-)
  - bitexploder 5y ago
    To some extent yep. The media companies overplayed their hand and made it too expensive or annoying to keep up with.
jra_samba 5y ago
I bought 3 OSMC Vero 4k boxes (https://osmc.tv/vero/ https://osmc.tv/vero/). Basically a dedicated Kodi box on ARM hardware. Nothing but a happy customer, I use them to play content from my dedicated home server over SMB2.
- _joel 5y ago
  I've had one for about 3 years since the 4k version originally came out and it hasn't missed a beat. Support has been good too, fully available dev builds and community interaction for getting more cutting edge (don't forget it's based on debinan) stuff like wireguard kernel support up and running etc (now all included in default builds)
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  just bought 2 for my parents recently. i had been using kodi on a raspberry pi before that and it was ok, but had to reboot every few days when nothing would play. im not sure was it the emby plugin or emby itself but everything is working great now with to the vero devices, and they have now have the same remote and UI for each TV
netcyrax 5y ago
OSMC (www.osmc.tv) is quite great (based on Kodi).
eximius 5y ago
Gah, I'm finally giving OSMC another try this year (tuned downstream distro of Kodi). Honestly, the biggest problem is I probably need to organize my NFS so the dang indexing works. That was always the biggest problem I had in the past (and buffering/encoding stuttering, but that was from WiFi/weak RaspberryPi processing).
jaimex2 5y ago
Kodi is fantastic. Nothing really comes close to how good it is. Definitely not for your grandma though.
bane 5y ago
I honestly can't keep track anymore. I've used plex for a number of years and it's "fine" but they keep spending time developing things I don't want and ignoring things the community would like in an effort to "go commercial" and "legitimatize". I want a media center that can do these things: - access from phone or tablet: remote is nice to have, but on my own network is a must - can chromecast everything - can scrape metadata reliably (I don't mind fixing a few things here and there) - supports movies, tv shows, random videos - automatic subtitle downloading - supports music formats, podcasts, and audio books and understands they are different things, and can grab them as needed - supports not only mp3s, oggs, etc. for music, but supports stuff their underlying media libraries already support like amiga mod, chiptune formats etc. (a major gripe of mine with plex). right now I need to convert to mp3 for this need, but the media libraries plex uses already supports these formats, it's just the damn gui and library indexing bits don't - support for photo libraries - ebooks, pdfs, cbz, cbr, etc. (I need extra apps for this) - emulator support would be a super sweet stretch goal - has smart tv apps would be also great, but chromecast support is fine Does Kodi, emby, jellyfin, whatever support all this?
- Dedime 5y ago
  As far as Jellyfin goes in my own experience: - Supports phone / tablet / browser / roku / others - Can chromecast - Supports movies, tv. Not sure about random videos but I suppose you could do it. - Supports subtitle downloading - Haven't used it myself, but supports podcasts, books, photos, music Also FOSS. Doesn't have the same motive as commercial software ala Plex to nag you, and it hasn't nagged me yet.
  - kevincox 5y ago
    I use jellyfin myself but it is so incredibly slow that often it is basically non-functional. It seems that usually when I first open it after a while it is fast enough but then it rapidly slows to a crawl where it sometimes can't even start the next episode in a series. I'm not running it on fantastic hardware but it should me more than sufficient for this task, other services on the box are snappy. I would happily replace it if I could find an alternative. The developers also have no concept of security past the very basics. Make sure you run it in a network namrspace or something otherwise it will accidently bind to random network interfaces even though you told it to use the loopback address. The devs don't seem to think this is a problem. Falling back to a public interface is a feature that prevents support requests.
DrewRWx 5y ago
My favorite moment of project synergy was back when Kodi was called XBMC, it ran on the original Xbox, and it could be used as an alternate Xbox dashboard in addition to being a media library/player. One of the extensions it added was a front-end for https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/ https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/ , one of the original services for tunneling local multiplayer online. Around the same time, https://dd-wrt.com/ https://dd-wrt.com/ added Linksys WRT54G builds with XLink Kai backend support. So I was able to load that build on my router and keep a persistent connection to service while using XBMC's frontend to pick a lobby and load Halo 2 from disc into multiplayer mode.
progman32 5y ago
This may be unpopular, but after using Kodi and similar software for many years (and enjoying it!), I just gravitated back to the basics. Want to watch a movie? Navigate to it in my file manager and play it with VLC. Music? Just use Winamp 2 or Audacious. I realized I was messing with odd HDMI passthrough issues, database issues, audio sync, broken plugins, stressing about tagging, etc etc every movie night much more than just enjoying my media. My friend (Plex and Kodi user) had the same issues, we'd usually spend an entire beer at the start of the evening troubleshooting things. The most lasting thing from those days was setting up a proper NAS, first to house my media, then everything else. The main thing I miss is wireless controller support, but KDE Connect on my phone has completely obviated that. It even integrates with streaming sites, youtube, VLC, Audacious, almost everything that exposes a media API. So I can sit on my couch or walk around and control my KDE machine with minimal effort. My PC audio playback even pauses when I get a phone call. If I need more control I can use my phone's screen as a touchpad mouse. You can't easily remotely compose playlists with this setup but I usually listen album by album or on global shuffle, and that's good enough for me. Am I just old school? What are people's favorite "killer apps" for software like Kodi? Is it just convenience and I've have had bad luck?
- rcoilliot 5y ago
  The issue with Kodi is, in my opinion, the same as with setting up a mame cab for playing roms : Perpetual Work In Progress. Users are spending way more time configuring, optimizing, and eventually breaking the whole thing than actually enjoying it. On my side, i'm playing my content with my AppleTV through a Plex server on a Nas, using wired network, and I couldn't be happier. Using a professionnal, closed, solution, sometimes make things better.
  - karlshea 5y ago
    > Users are spending way more time configuring, optimizing, and eventually breaking the whole thing than actually enjoying it. When I used Kodi that was part of the appeal. But then I had two Kodi boxes and media on a NAS and wanted them to sync played status. Eventually Emby with the Kodi Sync plugin was the way to do that instead of trying to share a database. But then I got an Apple TV 4K, and the Emby app runs on that too, and now same as you it’s what I end up using.
sandreas 5y ago
Kodi is awesome... I'm currently developing a little helper to link RFID cards to specific actions (like play an audio or video file). Everyone who is insterested in Kodi should definitely take a look at the "all in one" distributions for Raspbery and friends: Libreelec (https://libreelec.tv/ https://libreelec.tv/, sucessor of OpenElec) is a superfast standalone OS that can be flashed and has autoupdate - due to readonly FS it is not as customizable, than raspbian, but therefore very easy and fast. OSMC (https://osmc.tv/ https://osmc.tv/) is similar to Libreelec, but with support for installing extra packages, but a little slower boot time and non-readonly-FS. Ideal if you would like to make use of custom scripts, GPIO buttons, RFIDs or webcam. Kodi also has a HUGE JSONRPC-API (https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v12 https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v12), that supports nearly every feature to be controlled remotely via script or App and has a pretty nice webinterface.
bung 5y ago
Tangential, but since so many of you are here... is there anything today like a Boxee Box? Nice little device with remote that my mom could use.
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  To continue a theme here, Boxee's software originated as a fork of XBMC.
- patrickk 5y ago
  There are a plethora of streaming boxes out there. Arguably the best is an Nvidia shield pro, which I use. It runs everything you want and more (YouTube, plex, jellyfin, iptv, local tv station apps...), via the Google Play store. If you want to run unofficial apps, you can unlock that with some initial setup. After that it’s dead easy to use for non techies and blazing fast compared to cheaper android boxes or apps that are packaged with smart TVs.
rcpt 5y ago
Anyone use this to replace a car DVD player?
Nux 5y ago
Kodi is an absolute godsend! My living room main stack is Rpi+Libreelec+Kodi, it works wonderfully and it's my main way to consume media: video, music, inet radio and youtube. I use the TV remote to control it via CEC in conjuction with the Yatse Remote app which gives me better control and allows me to do even more. It's great.
bennyp101 5y ago
I used to use it when it was XBMC, but for some reason that escapes me now, I ended up switching to Plex, and stayed there. I think it was just after they rebranded to Kodi, something happened and it didn't work right - my memory is a bit hazy
orloffm 5y ago
I use Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 3. It plays everything 1080p apart from h265 sources. Can't recommend enough.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  I'm now using ffmpeg to transcode 'acquired' h265 media to h264 for my Pi. It would be nice if a future Pi could support h265.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
hyperman1 5y ago
I got an old PC my job was dumping(Haswell, I think), installed kodi, and put it under the TV. Then copied all our DVDs on the hard disk. Use the android app as remote. It works flawlessly. The startup time is a bit slow, but once running, my 4 year old kid can choose his bed time series and watch 1 or 2 episodes on his own. My wife also knows her way around. Now there are tons of unused options in there, but who cares. But I never had to mess around with the settings like the other poster experiences, it just works. Only problem is I can't manage to play from the Nickelodeon website, but maybe a bit of googling might unearth a webbrowser plugin.
gadders 5y ago
The problem with these systems is limited smart TV support. Unfortunately none of them support Firefox OS any more. Plex used to, but had some row with Panasonic and removed it from the store. Now I just use the DLNA browser in my TV to find the video file I want to watch on my main PC.
Jnr 5y ago
I use Kodi as my main TV/Steambox UI. It handles movies, shows, twitch, live TV (wrote addon to work with local IPTV provider), launching Steam games, streaming from sources :). Movie/show progress is synchronized to Trakt, and Trakt also provides list of trending shows and movies, so I always have an overview in a single place, no need to go to 10 different streaming services. But the default UI is just terrible. I use it with Arctic Horizon theme and it improves it a lot but not everything can be improved with custom theme. https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=351756 https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=351756 I wish they did a UI overhaul to make it a bit more modern. Having customized it over the years, I see how powerful it can be, but defaults are quite unfriendly.
mkdirp 5y ago
I've been using Kodi for some 5 years now. At the height of piracy addons here in the UK a few years ago I was quite worried that Kodi devs would just give up, and I'm glad they didn't. For anyone who uses a PVR device, I highly recommend using TVHeadend, with Kodi as a frontend it's been the perfect PVR system. TVHeadend allows to define multiple inputs (HDHomerun, DVB-C/T, IPTV, and lots others) and adds the rest of the tooling on top to have a full PVR system. TVHeadend itself has a really bad UI, and as lots of issues, but once set up, you do not have to care about its UI any more and you'll need it very little.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  I was really confused for a while when I started hearing regular people talking about Kodi. It took a while to realise that Kodi had become synonymous with "free footie on your telly". I once saw this photocopied series of instructions for installing one of those plugins on your telly. It was like 15 sheets of A4 that was being photocopied and passed around workplaces.
wiz21c 5y ago
I've got about 200 DVD's but each time I look at Kodi (or others) it basically means : rip the DVD first... Which is the last thing I want to do when I want to actually look at the DVD. Is there a solution to RIP the DVD (I'm OK with it's just an ISO copy) while playing it ? So that I don't have to think about it first ?
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  That is a really cool idea! It doesn't sound like it is a major factor in your use case, but Kodi is one of the few players that not only can play directly from ISOs either compressed or uncompressed.
  - keithah 5y ago
    Altho there's definitely been problems w/ menus on both dads and blu-rays over the years, super annoying the backend libs keep changing and breaking stuff in Kodi.
mmlkrx 5y ago
Right on the homepage it says "Kodi brings your media to life". Apart from piracy, what are legal ways to acquire my own media? When I can't find something on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I typically just buy it on Amazon but Amazon doesn't provide me with a video file. Are there any places I can buy digital media that allow me to download and manage my own media files?
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Rip your own Blu-rays.
- knoopx 5y ago
  people used to buy CD/DVD/BR and rip them. nowadays it's easier and faster to download from somewhere.
  - knoopx 5y ago
    I use plex and only archive music because my collection is rare and will degrade over time (vinyl). not owning the media is what prevents me from using these services too (apart from the lack of catalog). fortunately there's bandcamp and some other sites that understand the rights of the consumer. btw plex + plexamp is fantastic
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Spend $30 on vastly overpriced Blu-Ray discs to get the "digital edition"
- lvass 5y ago
  It's just so convenient to backup your physical media and use Kodi to play it. It's 100% legal, I swear I ripped it myself and just happened to lose the original disks.
  - Mindwipe 5y ago
    > It's 100% legal In some territories. Though I would note breaking DRM to format shift content isn't legal in basically any functioning country in the world.
bestouff 5y ago
I love Kodi, it runs my house for watching movies, listening to my mp3 collection or internet radios, and does it great. However what I'm really missing is a way to stream everything in and out: - allow streaming audio to other computers for multi-room audio - allow streaming audio from phones or computers when I throw a party at home and people want to play DJ - allow streaming audio+video from a computer to use my big screen from a laptop without plugging wires Of course there are some plugins that do a part of that, but they're hard to configure and break often (when they work); I'd really like that to work as simply and reliably as the media playing works now
- globular-toast 5y ago
  If you enable "AirPlay" on Kodi it just works with Apple devices, in my experience. I'm not sure why there isn't something that easy for Android, but I suspect it's Google being evil and wanting you to buy one of their devices. Conceptually it's trivial with Pulseaudio to stream over the network. I ended up getting a bluetooth receiver for mine which allowed me to play from any phone (you do need to do a little bit of Pulseaudio config on the Kodi device, though).
  - bestouff 5y ago
    Yes I tried via PulseAudio but it didn't work very well, and as it doesn't go through Kodi you can't see what's playing currently. As for AirPlay, I only have android phones so I can't test it.
- Shorel 5y ago
  For network video or audio streaming, I use NDI. When I found it, it was quite a pleasant surprise.
  - keithah 5y ago
    Do you have more links on NDI? Is it free? I think Kodi would be interested in integrating!
fbanon 5y ago
My gripe with Kodi is that it's horribly slow at scanning even my medium-sized (~1.5 TB) music collection. I've tried switching to UPnP so that the metadata is scanned locally on the media server, but Kodi's UPnP support is horribly broken. I've tried fixing some of the issues, but it's an endless rabbit hole of spaghetti code...
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Pretty sure the time consuming but of that is the metadata lookups going to the internet.
  - fbanon 5y ago
    Nope, I've turned off online metadata. I've debugged it and the issue is that Kodi wouldn't pipeline the SMB read requests, so a huge chunk of time is spent waiting for small bits of data to arrive.
    - kasabali 5y ago
      SFTP add-on [1] has been faster and more reliable in my experience 1. https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:SFTP_support https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:SFTP_support
    - razze 5y ago
      Did you create an issue for this? My last info was, that we don't process anything in parallel, as the old xml scrapers were not optimized for that. As we're moving to python scrapers now, we should be able to optimize the interface to handle more in parallel. That was the plan at least, but XML scrapers first need to be removed, as they hold back the API.
  - wiether 5y ago
    Plex does the same, yet it take a few seconds to do that on the same library.
blentrop 5y ago
I have found that after trying a bunch of different setups during the years. Kodi, Plex, etc. I have settled on using: Sonarr[0], Radarr[1] and Lidarr[2]; combined with Jacket[3] and your favorite torrent downloader (I use Deluge). Add the TV Series you follow or movies you want to watch. This setup downloads everything for me once a movie or episode becomes available to download, and then I only watch content that is already downloaded using VLC. This is pretty good specially if your Internet connection is a bit spotty at times. I've been using this setup for years now, and I'm pretty happy with it. [0] https://sonarr.tv/ https://sonarr.tv/ [1] https://radarr.video/ https://radarr.video/ [2] https://lidarr.audio/ https://lidarr.audio/ [3] https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
quda 5y ago
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
How to install it on my LG tv? It has WebOS.
mattowen_uk 5y ago
My Kodi set-up is a few-years-old copy of LibreELEC[1] set to NOT auto update. I've barely configured it beyond giving the SMB paths to my video collection. I ignore all the meta-data rubbish it wants to add, and just browse to what I want to watch via the text-based list that's built into the default skin. It's all running on a Raspberry Pi 3b hooked into my big home theatre rig. Granted, 90% of my Kodi viewing is Dr Who episodes[2] so I'm probably not the target market for it, but as long as you don't fiddle with it, it works just fine. What I WOULD like is a new skin that strips everything out of the UI except my video library. I have absolutely no use for the music section, the photos(who seriously uses that?!) or the weather. I've briefly looked into the XML that is used for Kodi skinning, but life is too short for me even to want to go there. --- [1] https://libreelec.tv/ https://libreelec.tv/ [2] http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/drwho/ http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/drwho/
- kiririn 5y ago
  If you want full skin customisation (including menus/layouts) via GUI, Amber is a good choice. It is the most customisable skin, and one of about 2-3 skins that seems like a UI designer has had a hand in it
- thanatos519 5y ago
  I would be happy to complete your Doctor Who collection. It's definitely worth watching all of it.
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    Thanks for the offer but... I know there's torrents of the whole lot out there, but for me part of the enjoyment is buying the discs (at a slow pace, due to budget), ripping them, and watching them.
sebow 5y ago
If you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty, kodi is powerful and must-have software for consuming media in your home. However for the average user i might think it's a little bit overwhelming, of course this mainly depends on the wanted use.Plex might be suitable for most in that regard, emby used to be aswell though somehow they managed to fall a lot imo. Good companion apps for kodi are KDE-Connect, bubbleupnp, UMS Server.
yboris 5y ago
For browsing, previewing, searching, and organizing videos I created Video Hub App. The primary feature is scrub / preview thumbnails from inside the video as you hover with your mouse and an infinite scroll of all your videos. It also has a "filmstrip" view to see all screenshots at once. I hope it is useful to some of you here. https://videohubapp.com/en/ https://videohubapp.com/en/ Open source MIT: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
- disqard 5y ago
  Thank you for creating this! It's perfect for my current needs :) Do you use sqlite under the hood? Also, what's the largest collection / folder size that you know videohub can handle? Also, I just bought it anyway -- I am impressed at how you donate a generous portion of every sale to charity!
  - yboris 5y ago
    The "file system" is stupid-easy: just a JSON file renamed to `.vha2` -- see the interface here: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfaces/final-object.interface.ts#L15 https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfac... I've had no problems with 20,000 videos in a "hub" and I've heard people pushing past 100k. JavaScript has no problem applying .filter() across this many objects quickly. Each search is its own .filter method (inside an Angular pipe) so every search should be virtually instant. And since the screenshots are pre-extracted (the most time-consuming part of using the app), you should be able to infinite-scroll with no delays in loading previews.
Minor49er 5y ago
I have a few Fire Sticks that I got on sale. I installed Kodi on them. They read from a NAS that I also have that serves files via SMBv1/CIFS. It's super easy to stream music and movies locally now.
JetSpiegel 5y ago
Kodi already has a (passable) web interface, so it's possible to expose that externally and get on-premises Spotify and Netflix on the same interface. The main problem is that the remote control and the remote viewing interfaces are co-mingled, it's not very usable. There are alternative interfaces, but they are crappier.

428 points by dkobran 5y ago

Is there not a getting started section on this page? After skimming the linked page and comments here, it seems to be very configurable in how it runs, but besides a community forum, is there just a general setup guide for a basic use case somewhere?

vaviloff 5y ago

Wow, so much praise for Kodi, and it's well-deserved. Been using LibreELEC (which is basically a Kodi OS) on just a RPi3 for a few years now, it's a good enough client for non-smart TV to simply browse stuff from NAS with Yatse on Android. In a bare minimum case not too difficult to set up, just add a source via SFTP and you're done, no need for scanning.

thrusong 5y ago

Longtime Kodi user here. Bought an M1 MacBook Air in the spring and Kodi barely works. Video won't display even though the sound works fine, and instead the mouse will multiply thousands of time. You can move the mouse around and just leave trails of mouse cursors everywhere. It's like one out of every four times it will work as expected, but requires quitting and re-opening it over and over.

kadoban 5y ago
You can configure Kodi to use other video players to actually play. Probably worth doing. I do it myself because for whatever reason Kodi's player crashes like crazy on my Windows htpc.
jaimex2 5y ago
M1 is still new tech that is hit and miss with anything not from the walled garden. There's not enough interest to fix/develop for it.
smoldesu 5y ago
That's really curious considering how Kodi treats ARM targets as a first-class citizen. I'm guessing it has to do with Apple's own underlying systems?
- danachow 5y ago
  Kodi targets low cost ARM SBCs as a first class citizen. ARM is (a family) of instruction sets - for something like a media player it is down near the least important aspect of providing support. Kodi targets a boat load of low cost embedded SoC ARM devices but these bear little resemblance to an M1 based MacBook except for the instruction set. Kodi will run fine on typical x86 PC setups because this hardware is commonly available.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I'm aware of the difference, I just haven't quite seen the effects of ARM ISA variations in action quite yet. I was kinda under the impression that v8 would be back-compatible with v6 and v7 ARM.
    - danachow 5y ago
      Yeah and what I’m saying is that any ARM ISA variations have little to do with anything. Kodi is a C++ application primarily and uses off the shelf compilers. The support issues have more to do with hardware and OS compatibility.
- Mayzie 5y ago
  It really doesn’t. There hasn’t been an active Android maintainer for ages at this point - it’s only just barely supported.

StockHuman 5y ago

For your consideration, Jellyfin. [0] [0] https://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/

schemathings 5y ago
Interesting - I bought Emby this year for serving local media - my one gripe is no thumbnails/preview when you scrub over the timeline - this one has it. Will give it a spin.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- DenseComet 5y ago
  Jellyfin is actually a fork of Emby, created after Emby went closed source.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    I wondered why the UI elements looked so similar. I had tried Emby as my first media server, and then realized there were paid features, and switched to Jellyfin.
- kuschku 5y ago
  There's actually ongoing work on extremely efficient tooling for thumbnails/previews :)
  - schemathings 5y ago
    That's good to hear!
    - kuschku 5y ago
      For jellyfin, that is. For emby, I doubt they’ll manage to even copy the technique

psychstudio 5y ago

Been using Kodi (XBMC) for nearly 20 years. The piracy FUD surrounding XBMC a few years ago really disappointed me. We use Kodi for streaming tv (Australia) and internet radio and it is perfect for this. That's all I wanted to say really. The piracy FUD has been disappointing.

afavour 5y ago
It’s not really FUD in the vast majority of cases, though. Kodi is used to play pirated content the vast majority of the time. No value judgment either way by me but it’s obviously true. Same with Plex.
- harry8 5y ago
  This is like saying cars are used to escape from bank robberies or people walk out their front doors to commit crimes. Just insane, sorry.
  - puchatek 5y ago
    Try "cars are used to commute". Still insane? No, because that's a very likely usecase. Just like playing pirated content via a media center. Now why would your reply completely ignore the actual likelihood of an event?
    - harry8 5y ago
      No it's absolutely and completely nonsense. Try "Kodi is used to manage and play video files" instead. Because (a) that is not illegal and (b) that is true. You have no idea how many people use Kodi to manage their dvds they ripped using handbrake, for example. None. Zero. You have no idea how many people use kodi for streaming Al-Jazeera news or msnbc/fox disinformation. So now you're just speculating and trying to claim a useful tool, like a car, can be used in association with an illegal act, like a bank robbery getaway car. That's it. Even if you did have actual data, which you don't, it's utterly irrelevant. There is are multiple ordinary, expected, and designed for legal uses of kodi. Kodi is being used legally, properly and ethically by a great many people. That is clear and not in dispute. Take it one step further to see it with stunning clarity. What percentage of home computers have been used in some fashion with copyrighted material where Disney et al claim they should be paid ever more and have repeatedly changed laws by paying large sums to politicians to effect that law-enforcement supported revenue increase? With no data someone claims "most home computers are used this way" and makes your comment about ignoring likelihood when called out for it. It really is just a nuts analysis and should be called as such.

rglullis 5y ago

Kodi is the perfect example of how amateurs (in the good sense of the word) can make something long-lasting and provide an alternative that is better than whatever the "industry" wants to shove down our throats.

supertrope 5y ago
A lot of companies have a conflict of interest between making the best software and prioritizing synergy with another division. Sony Electronics added DRM to their formats to help Columbia Pictures.

Ballu 5y ago

I used to play with these software long time back, Kodi was the last one before moving to "whatever" stick :) (And I am not into media now) But I have question regarding media, what are you going to play? Where are you going to download the movies/songs, etc unless use illegal ways. It was amazing journey of few years for me, ripping CDs, DVDs, VCDs, BluRay, HD-DVD, etc and playing all those on TV with Kodi box. (Eventually moved to WDTV box).

dakial1 5y ago

Kodi, Plex, the late Boxee are all pioneers and the pillars of what streaming services have of user experience today. I remember when I first saw Boxee interface back at the piracy-wild-west era and thought how wonderful and easy it was to watch a movie with it. I even had transmission setup on a NAS (DNS-323) automatically downloading my preferred shows that appeared without much effort on my TV. The truth is that I didn't pirate because I wanted to pay nothing for media, I did it because I wanted the streaming experience and ability to have movies available on demand, not some cumbersome physical media whose purpose was only to guarantee studios/record labels profit at the expense of my consumption experience. They didn't care about me so I didn't care about them, something that changed with the coming of Netflix, Spotify, Google Music and all others... Now I gladly pay what I consider a fair fee for their services and amazing hassle-free experience. These wouldn't have happened (as quickly at least) without the 2000's piracy world and the media platforms build around it...

jrm4 5y ago

Bit of a thread hijack, but: I'm surprised at what appears to be the lack of a simple and lightweight "10 foot interface" for Linux. You have projects like Kodi and KDE BigScreen, but (as most people are noting here) a lot of us don't need all the bells and whistles (and e.g. compositing). A 10 foot browser + filemanager + music player + movie player would probably handle it. "Mouseless" would be nice, but maybe not even that? Is this out there and a bunch of us are missing it? Basically a 10 foot openbox?

Sugimot0 5y ago

I've found https://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/ to be the best solution for my needs, but the setup is more involved.

pabs3 5y ago

Maybe after the Software Freedom Conservancy lawsuit is won, Kodi will be able to run on Vizio TVs. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

keithah 5y ago
The problem is the toolkit offered, more than anything else. Kodi needs lots of native code hooks into the OS, which Tizen, WebOSTV, etc don't support, or at least don't give access freely. Otherwise Kodi could be on every platform.. Most TV OS's that aren't Android TV or Roku require you to write web-based apps (unless you're Netflix or YouTube, but another story there) which abstract all the 'good stuff' out, so impossible to run Kodi on. Roku is an even worse mess (forcing you to use Brightscript, a digital signage language they bought forever go and still maintain)
- pabs3 5y ago
  I was suggesting that instead of the pre-installed OS on Vizio TVs (which is Linux and systemd based according to the lawsuit), you could install your own OS and then run Kodi on top of that. Since Kodi already supports running on Linux, it should not be hard to do this setup once the lawsuit concludes and the code has been released and the installation procedure documented. So the platform offered by the TV doesn't matter, because you'll replace it with a normal Linux one and run whatever you want on top. For the problem of running Kodi on the web and web-ish platforms, maybe WASM is the future? There is also emscripten for converting languages normally compiled to binaries to JavaScript. For Brightscript, maybe a similar approach to emscripten would work, transpiling from other languages to Brightscript, possibly via JavaScript. Or I guess a second app based on Brightscript.

shawnk 5y ago

Isn’t this what got omi in a hellcat in trouble??

3np 5y ago
By the same logic, uTorrent was what got the TPB founders in trouble.
paradaux 5y ago
Kodi is just the media suite, what add-ons one installs in it is neither their concern or their liability. The same goes for similar offerings like Jellyfin/Plex, if the end user uses a pirated streaming service that is on them and the service provider (which Omi was.) It was this which got him into trouble, not the fact he used Kodi.
Brian-Puccio 5y ago
> A flamboyant YouTuber known as Omi in a Hellcat was charged with illegally selling copyrighted TV shows and movies through an online service, prosecutors said. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/us/bill-omar-carrasquillo-charged.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/us/bill-omar-carrasquillo... So no.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Omi got Omi in trouble, kodi is a tool that can play "illegal" downloads or your family home videos and grandma's church piano concert. It doesn't care which.
keithah 5y ago
Omi was running an IPTV service, nothing to do with Kodi.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xfalcox 5y ago

Kodi is awesome. The fact that it can run everywhere, with such a consistent UI is a great, and I have used it in x86 HTPCs, RPI, Android TV over the years.

28uwedj 5y ago

Stremio is way better.

zeruch 5y ago
Why?
ur-whale 5y ago
> Stremio is way better. In what way?

mikeryan 5y ago

For anyone new to it, Kodi is hardly new its been around for almost 20 years now, starting life as Xbox Media Player and later Xbox Media Center. It's been pretty okay at what it does for a while now and has really been competing primarily with Plex as the place to store "your own copies of movies" and has really become the leading open source solution as Plex has become something of a commercial option.

DrewRWx 5y ago
And Plex started as a MacOS port of XBMC before those devs split off, completely re-wrote, and renamed it Plex. *My timeline is prolly slightly off, but those are the major plot beats.

don-code 5y ago

I used Kodi in its very early days as Xbox Media Center. XBMC turned the original-generation Xbox into a cheap and very functional media center PC - I actually didn't stop using mine until I upgraded to HD in the early 2010s. More recently, I've been running it on a Raspberry Pi 3A in my kitchen. It interacts with my DVR upstairs, so that I can pause TV there and pick it up downstairs. I credit the fact that it was originally designed to run on the Xbox as the reason it works as well as it does on even the original Raspberry Pi.

nebula8804 5y ago
I got an XBOX because my late father was a .NET developer and very much into Microsoft technologies so he thought the XBOX was a nifty device. The software on that device was just so lousy. I was into Squaresoft type RPGs/Nintendo 64 era Rare games and the XBOX did not deliver. Only games I ever bought for that console were Shenmue 2 and Blinx the Time sweeper. However that simple 20$ LPC mod chip opened up a world of amazing little games/emulators and tons of entertainment that made the XBOX totally memorable even 20+ years later. The device got hundreds of hours of usage that it would not have otherwise and cemented in my mind the amazing magic of homebrew software. Man I miss those years so much.
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  Modding my XBOX using a chip my friend was forced to sell me because it got his dad banned from XBOX Live was the best thing that ever happened to me. The first SCMs I ever learned were CVS and SVN in order to mildly tweak and compile my first ever program, XBMC. It inspired me so much that in my second (or "interests") University of California admission essay I wrote at length about the experience and others like compiling and loading Rockbox on my DAP. In a happy twist, I was still offered a Regent Scholarship to a a few UC campuses. Even ones I didn't apply to.

thesausageking 5y ago

How does this compare to Plex?

Quick2822 5y ago
I used XBMC (and then Kodi) for many years, had it installed on AppleTV, FireTV, etc, etc but I eventually migrated fully to Plex. I found that I prefer Plex over Kodi when dealing with local media. Eventually Kodi only felt useful if you wanted to dive into the world of streaming movies and shows from various shady sources.
jaimex2 5y ago
Kodi is for power users, Plex is for anyone who just wants a place to host their media collection.
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  You can mix-and-match too! Plex puts out an official Kodi plugin: https://github.com/plexinc/plex-for-kodi https://github.com/plexinc/plex-for-kodi .
  - keithah 5y ago
    Unfortunately Plex stopped caring it years ago..
colordrops 5y ago
Jellyfin is more like Plex. Kodi is more like Roku.
- DrewRWx 5y ago
  - Plex is a closed source fork-and-re-write of an MacOS XBMC port that was codenamed OSXBMC. - Jellyfin is a fork of Emby at the version before it went closed source. - Emby was an open-source re-implementation of Plex. - Genealogy is weird.
5y ago

LeoPanthera 5y ago

I run LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi, which is a just-enough-OS for Kodi. It works great, and is even a good choice for playing music over HDMI, because unlike some other music-playing distributions, it doesn't use ALSA, and simply bit-bangs the decoded audio out of the HDMI port. Works very well.

azalemeth 5y ago
Indeed. It's also worth mentioning that the very inexpensive Digital TV tuner "just works" (at least in Europe) and with tvheadend you can then stream the live stream around your home network trivially. That's what the rpi4 running Kodi in our bedroom does at least. The streams are so in sync that you can listen to them on two separate devices in other bits of the house without an audio phase difference. Kodi is an amazing project and deserves much praise.
Deukhoofd 5y ago
I really want to like LibreElec, but the frequent crashes of the entire OS makes it hard for me to do so. A day doesn't go by that the entire system crashes on me. Connecting a bluetooth device? 50/50 chance that it crashes. Attempting to play a video that failed to play just before? Complete crash.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Sounds like a hardware problem. Libreelec has been running on my Pi2 for literally years. The only time I had problems was when the power supply of my Pi failed. If you're running a Pi, try changing the PSU. Bad power can cause many problems that you wouldn't expect.
swayvil 5y ago
Ditto. Has ALL the codecs. Listening to music on it right now (Stars of the Lid).
Smoosh 5y ago
There's also OSMC, which is minimal Debian + Kodi.

deagle50 5y ago

First rule of fight club...

DrewRWx 5y ago
Don't you mean the First Rule of Open Source: "Tell your friends!"?

dave_sullivan 5y ago

The real OGs had this running on a modded original Xbox when it was still xbmc. In order to watch MST3K episodes from emule. Running CoreELEC on an odroid N2+ now, highly recommended.

threeio 5y ago
Keep circulating the tapes!
DrewRWx 5y ago
Agreed, but as one of those OGs the "real" OGs are the ones that ran it on the original Xbox when it was called XBMP.
wallaBBB 5y ago
I tried a bunch of things on the N2+, but I kept having to install Kodi on whatever I was running and ultimately settled on CoreELEC to keep the things simple and running. For HTPC there is really no good competing ecosystem
tunap 5y ago
The OGs were using Hauppage WinTV & ATI AIWs long before Xbox was released.
- bartimus 5y ago
  MythTV. I spent so much time fiddling with it. My setup would automatically record the 1 hour block of BBC World News and transcode it to make it suitable for the PSP so I could watch it on the train to work.

bitexploder 5y ago

We have a Linux server with Samba. Kodi connects to it beautifully. Even my kids can use it fine. Combine with VM that runs a VPN and deluge for optimal fun. Add a few simple IPTables rules to prevent traffic from leaking except over your VPN to calm down annoying Torrent monitors that your ISP might use. Been working for years. We vastly prefer to pay for content, but we ancient DVD rips and such that are not amenable to the modern media tech stack.

thejosh 5y ago
Old: Usenet Then: Netflix/other streaming Now: Too many streaming services, back to old :-)
- bitexploder 5y ago
  To some extent yep. The media companies overplayed their hand and made it too expensive or annoying to keep up with.

jra_samba 5y ago

I bought 3 OSMC Vero 4k boxes (https://osmc.tv/vero/ https://osmc.tv/vero/). Basically a dedicated Kodi box on ARM hardware. Nothing but a happy customer, I use them to play content from my dedicated home server over SMB2.

_joel 5y ago
I've had one for about 3 years since the 4k version originally came out and it hasn't missed a beat. Support has been good too, fully available dev builds and community interaction for getting more cutting edge (don't forget it's based on debinan) stuff like wireguard kernel support up and running etc (now all included in default builds)
mackrevinack 5y ago
just bought 2 for my parents recently. i had been using kodi on a raspberry pi before that and it was ok, but had to reboot every few days when nothing would play. im not sure was it the emby plugin or emby itself but everything is working great now with to the vero devices, and they have now have the same remote and UI for each TV

netcyrax 5y ago

OSMC (www.osmc.tv) is quite great (based on Kodi).

eximius 5y ago

Gah, I'm finally giving OSMC another try this year (tuned downstream distro of Kodi). Honestly, the biggest problem is I probably need to organize my NFS so the dang indexing works. That was always the biggest problem I had in the past (and buffering/encoding stuttering, but that was from WiFi/weak RaspberryPi processing).

jaimex2 5y ago

Kodi is fantastic. Nothing really comes close to how good it is. Definitely not for your grandma though.

bane 5y ago

I honestly can't keep track anymore. I've used plex for a number of years and it's "fine" but they keep spending time developing things I don't want and ignoring things the community would like in an effort to "go commercial" and "legitimatize". I want a media center that can do these things: - access from phone or tablet: remote is nice to have, but on my own network is a must - can chromecast everything - can scrape metadata reliably (I don't mind fixing a few things here and there) - supports movies, tv shows, random videos - automatic subtitle downloading - supports music formats, podcasts, and audio books and understands they are different things, and can grab them as needed - supports not only mp3s, oggs, etc. for music, but supports stuff their underlying media libraries already support like amiga mod, chiptune formats etc. (a major gripe of mine with plex). right now I need to convert to mp3 for this need, but the media libraries plex uses already supports these formats, it's just the damn gui and library indexing bits don't - support for photo libraries - ebooks, pdfs, cbz, cbr, etc. (I need extra apps for this) - emulator support would be a super sweet stretch goal - has smart tv apps would be also great, but chromecast support is fine Does Kodi, emby, jellyfin, whatever support all this?

Dedime 5y ago
As far as Jellyfin goes in my own experience: - Supports phone / tablet / browser / roku / others - Can chromecast - Supports movies, tv. Not sure about random videos but I suppose you could do it. - Supports subtitle downloading - Haven't used it myself, but supports podcasts, books, photos, music Also FOSS. Doesn't have the same motive as commercial software ala Plex to nag you, and it hasn't nagged me yet.
- kevincox 5y ago
  I use jellyfin myself but it is so incredibly slow that often it is basically non-functional. It seems that usually when I first open it after a while it is fast enough but then it rapidly slows to a crawl where it sometimes can't even start the next episode in a series. I'm not running it on fantastic hardware but it should me more than sufficient for this task, other services on the box are snappy. I would happily replace it if I could find an alternative. The developers also have no concept of security past the very basics. Make sure you run it in a network namrspace or something otherwise it will accidently bind to random network interfaces even though you told it to use the loopback address. The devs don't seem to think this is a problem. Falling back to a public interface is a feature that prevents support requests.

DrewRWx 5y ago

My favorite moment of project synergy was back when Kodi was called XBMC, it ran on the original Xbox, and it could be used as an alternate Xbox dashboard in addition to being a media library/player. One of the extensions it added was a front-end for https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/ https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/ , one of the original services for tunneling local multiplayer online. Around the same time, https://dd-wrt.com/ https://dd-wrt.com/ added Linksys WRT54G builds with XLink Kai backend support. So I was able to load that build on my router and keep a persistent connection to service while using XBMC's frontend to pick a lobby and load Halo 2 from disc into multiplayer mode.

progman32 5y ago

This may be unpopular, but after using Kodi and similar software for many years (and enjoying it!), I just gravitated back to the basics. Want to watch a movie? Navigate to it in my file manager and play it with VLC. Music? Just use Winamp 2 or Audacious. I realized I was messing with odd HDMI passthrough issues, database issues, audio sync, broken plugins, stressing about tagging, etc etc every movie night much more than just enjoying my media. My friend (Plex and Kodi user) had the same issues, we'd usually spend an entire beer at the start of the evening troubleshooting things. The most lasting thing from those days was setting up a proper NAS, first to house my media, then everything else. The main thing I miss is wireless controller support, but KDE Connect on my phone has completely obviated that. It even integrates with streaming sites, youtube, VLC, Audacious, almost everything that exposes a media API. So I can sit on my couch or walk around and control my KDE machine with minimal effort. My PC audio playback even pauses when I get a phone call. If I need more control I can use my phone's screen as a touchpad mouse. You can't easily remotely compose playlists with this setup but I usually listen album by album or on global shuffle, and that's good enough for me. Am I just old school? What are people's favorite "killer apps" for software like Kodi? Is it just convenience and I've have had bad luck?

rcoilliot 5y ago
The issue with Kodi is, in my opinion, the same as with setting up a mame cab for playing roms : Perpetual Work In Progress. Users are spending way more time configuring, optimizing, and eventually breaking the whole thing than actually enjoying it. On my side, i'm playing my content with my AppleTV through a Plex server on a Nas, using wired network, and I couldn't be happier. Using a professionnal, closed, solution, sometimes make things better.
- karlshea 5y ago
  > Users are spending way more time configuring, optimizing, and eventually breaking the whole thing than actually enjoying it. When I used Kodi that was part of the appeal. But then I had two Kodi boxes and media on a NAS and wanted them to sync played status. Eventually Emby with the Kodi Sync plugin was the way to do that instead of trying to share a database. But then I got an Apple TV 4K, and the Emby app runs on that too, and now same as you it’s what I end up using.

sandreas 5y ago

Kodi is awesome... I'm currently developing a little helper to link RFID cards to specific actions (like play an audio or video file). Everyone who is insterested in Kodi should definitely take a look at the "all in one" distributions for Raspbery and friends: Libreelec (https://libreelec.tv/ https://libreelec.tv/, sucessor of OpenElec) is a superfast standalone OS that can be flashed and has autoupdate - due to readonly FS it is not as customizable, than raspbian, but therefore very easy and fast. OSMC (https://osmc.tv/ https://osmc.tv/) is similar to Libreelec, but with support for installing extra packages, but a little slower boot time and non-readonly-FS. Ideal if you would like to make use of custom scripts, GPIO buttons, RFIDs or webcam. Kodi also has a HUGE JSONRPC-API (https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v12 https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v12), that supports nearly every feature to be controlled remotely via script or App and has a pretty nice webinterface.

bung 5y ago

Tangential, but since so many of you are here... is there anything today like a Boxee Box? Nice little device with remote that my mom could use.

DrewRWx 5y ago
To continue a theme here, Boxee's software originated as a fork of XBMC.
patrickk 5y ago
There are a plethora of streaming boxes out there. Arguably the best is an Nvidia shield pro, which I use. It runs everything you want and more (YouTube, plex, jellyfin, iptv, local tv station apps...), via the Google Play store. If you want to run unofficial apps, you can unlock that with some initial setup. After that it’s dead easy to use for non techies and blazing fast compared to cheaper android boxes or apps that are packaged with smart TVs.

rcpt 5y ago

Anyone use this to replace a car DVD player?

Nux 5y ago

Kodi is an absolute godsend! My living room main stack is Rpi+Libreelec+Kodi, it works wonderfully and it's my main way to consume media: video, music, inet radio and youtube. I use the TV remote to control it via CEC in conjuction with the Yatse Remote app which gives me better control and allows me to do even more. It's great.

bennyp101 5y ago

I used to use it when it was XBMC, but for some reason that escapes me now, I ended up switching to Plex, and stayed there. I think it was just after they rebranded to Kodi, something happened and it didn't work right - my memory is a bit hazy

orloffm 5y ago

I use Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 3. It plays everything 1080p apart from h265 sources. Can't recommend enough.

mattowen_uk 5y ago
I'm now using ffmpeg to transcode 'acquired' h265 media to h264 for my Pi. It would be nice if a future Pi could support h265.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

hyperman1 5y ago

I got an old PC my job was dumping(Haswell, I think), installed kodi, and put it under the TV. Then copied all our DVDs on the hard disk. Use the android app as remote. It works flawlessly. The startup time is a bit slow, but once running, my 4 year old kid can choose his bed time series and watch 1 or 2 episodes on his own. My wife also knows her way around. Now there are tons of unused options in there, but who cares. But I never had to mess around with the settings like the other poster experiences, it just works. Only problem is I can't manage to play from the Nickelodeon website, but maybe a bit of googling might unearth a webbrowser plugin.

gadders 5y ago

The problem with these systems is limited smart TV support. Unfortunately none of them support Firefox OS any more. Plex used to, but had some row with Panasonic and removed it from the store. Now I just use the DLNA browser in my TV to find the video file I want to watch on my main PC.

Jnr 5y ago

I use Kodi as my main TV/Steambox UI. It handles movies, shows, twitch, live TV (wrote addon to work with local IPTV provider), launching Steam games, streaming from sources :). Movie/show progress is synchronized to Trakt, and Trakt also provides list of trending shows and movies, so I always have an overview in a single place, no need to go to 10 different streaming services. But the default UI is just terrible. I use it with Arctic Horizon theme and it improves it a lot but not everything can be improved with custom theme. https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=351756 https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=351756 I wish they did a UI overhaul to make it a bit more modern. Having customized it over the years, I see how powerful it can be, but defaults are quite unfriendly.

mkdirp 5y ago

I've been using Kodi for some 5 years now. At the height of piracy addons here in the UK a few years ago I was quite worried that Kodi devs would just give up, and I'm glad they didn't. For anyone who uses a PVR device, I highly recommend using TVHeadend, with Kodi as a frontend it's been the perfect PVR system. TVHeadend allows to define multiple inputs (HDHomerun, DVB-C/T, IPTV, and lots others) and adds the rest of the tooling on top to have a full PVR system. TVHeadend itself has a really bad UI, and as lots of issues, but once set up, you do not have to care about its UI any more and you'll need it very little.

globular-toast 5y ago
I was really confused for a while when I started hearing regular people talking about Kodi. It took a while to realise that Kodi had become synonymous with "free footie on your telly". I once saw this photocopied series of instructions for installing one of those plugins on your telly. It was like 15 sheets of A4 that was being photocopied and passed around workplaces.

wiz21c 5y ago

I've got about 200 DVD's but each time I look at Kodi (or others) it basically means : rip the DVD first... Which is the last thing I want to do when I want to actually look at the DVD. Is there a solution to RIP the DVD (I'm OK with it's just an ISO copy) while playing it ? So that I don't have to think about it first ?

DrewRWx 5y ago
That is a really cool idea! It doesn't sound like it is a major factor in your use case, but Kodi is one of the few players that not only can play directly from ISOs either compressed or uncompressed.
- keithah 5y ago
  Altho there's definitely been problems w/ menus on both dads and blu-rays over the years, super annoying the backend libs keep changing and breaking stuff in Kodi.

mmlkrx 5y ago

Right on the homepage it says "Kodi brings your media to life". Apart from piracy, what are legal ways to acquire my own media? When I can't find something on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I typically just buy it on Amazon but Amazon doesn't provide me with a video file. Are there any places I can buy digital media that allow me to download and manage my own media files?

globular-toast 5y ago
Rip your own Blu-rays.
knoopx 5y ago
people used to buy CD/DVD/BR and rip them. nowadays it's easier and faster to download from somewhere.
- knoopx 5y ago
  I use plex and only archive music because my collection is rare and will degrade over time (vinyl). not owning the media is what prevents me from using these services too (apart from the lack of catalog). fortunately there's bandcamp and some other sites that understand the rights of the consumer. btw plex + plexamp is fantastic
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Spend $30 on vastly overpriced Blu-Ray discs to get the "digital edition"
lvass 5y ago
It's just so convenient to backup your physical media and use Kodi to play it. It's 100% legal, I swear I ripped it myself and just happened to lose the original disks.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  > It's 100% legal In some territories. Though I would note breaking DRM to format shift content isn't legal in basically any functioning country in the world.

bestouff 5y ago

I love Kodi, it runs my house for watching movies, listening to my mp3 collection or internet radios, and does it great. However what I'm really missing is a way to stream everything in and out: - allow streaming audio to other computers for multi-room audio - allow streaming audio from phones or computers when I throw a party at home and people want to play DJ - allow streaming audio+video from a computer to use my big screen from a laptop without plugging wires Of course there are some plugins that do a part of that, but they're hard to configure and break often (when they work); I'd really like that to work as simply and reliably as the media playing works now

globular-toast 5y ago
If you enable "AirPlay" on Kodi it just works with Apple devices, in my experience. I'm not sure why there isn't something that easy for Android, but I suspect it's Google being evil and wanting you to buy one of their devices. Conceptually it's trivial with Pulseaudio to stream over the network. I ended up getting a bluetooth receiver for mine which allowed me to play from any phone (you do need to do a little bit of Pulseaudio config on the Kodi device, though).
- bestouff 5y ago
  Yes I tried via PulseAudio but it didn't work very well, and as it doesn't go through Kodi you can't see what's playing currently. As for AirPlay, I only have android phones so I can't test it.
Shorel 5y ago
For network video or audio streaming, I use NDI. When I found it, it was quite a pleasant surprise.
- keithah 5y ago
  Do you have more links on NDI? Is it free? I think Kodi would be interested in integrating!

fbanon 5y ago

My gripe with Kodi is that it's horribly slow at scanning even my medium-sized (~1.5 TB) music collection. I've tried switching to UPnP so that the metadata is scanned locally on the media server, but Kodi's UPnP support is horribly broken. I've tried fixing some of the issues, but it's an endless rabbit hole of spaghetti code...

deadbunny 5y ago
Pretty sure the time consuming but of that is the metadata lookups going to the internet.
- fbanon 5y ago
  Nope, I've turned off online metadata. I've debugged it and the issue is that Kodi wouldn't pipeline the SMB read requests, so a huge chunk of time is spent waiting for small bits of data to arrive.
  - kasabali 5y ago
    SFTP add-on [1] has been faster and more reliable in my experience 1. https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:SFTP_support https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:SFTP_support
  - razze 5y ago
    Did you create an issue for this? My last info was, that we don't process anything in parallel, as the old xml scrapers were not optimized for that. As we're moving to python scrapers now, we should be able to optimize the interface to handle more in parallel. That was the plan at least, but XML scrapers first need to be removed, as they hold back the API.
- wiether 5y ago
  Plex does the same, yet it take a few seconds to do that on the same library.

blentrop 5y ago

I have found that after trying a bunch of different setups during the years. Kodi, Plex, etc. I have settled on using: Sonarr[0], Radarr[1] and Lidarr[2]; combined with Jacket[3] and your favorite torrent downloader (I use Deluge). Add the TV Series you follow or movies you want to watch. This setup downloads everything for me once a movie or episode becomes available to download, and then I only watch content that is already downloaded using VLC. This is pretty good specially if your Internet connection is a bit spotty at times. I've been using this setup for years now, and I'm pretty happy with it. [0] https://sonarr.tv/ https://sonarr.tv/ [1] https://radarr.video/ https://radarr.video/ [2] https://lidarr.audio/ https://lidarr.audio/ [3] https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett

quda 5y ago

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

How to install it on my LG tv? It has WebOS.

mattowen_uk 5y ago

My Kodi set-up is a few-years-old copy of LibreELEC[1] set to NOT auto update. I've barely configured it beyond giving the SMB paths to my video collection. I ignore all the meta-data rubbish it wants to add, and just browse to what I want to watch via the text-based list that's built into the default skin. It's all running on a Raspberry Pi 3b hooked into my big home theatre rig. Granted, 90% of my Kodi viewing is Dr Who episodes[2] so I'm probably not the target market for it, but as long as you don't fiddle with it, it works just fine. What I WOULD like is a new skin that strips everything out of the UI except my video library. I have absolutely no use for the music section, the photos(who seriously uses that?!) or the weather. I've briefly looked into the XML that is used for Kodi skinning, but life is too short for me even to want to go there. --- [1] https://libreelec.tv/ https://libreelec.tv/ [2] http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/drwho/ http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/drwho/

kiririn 5y ago
If you want full skin customisation (including menus/layouts) via GUI, Amber is a good choice. It is the most customisable skin, and one of about 2-3 skins that seems like a UI designer has had a hand in it
thanatos519 5y ago
I would be happy to complete your Doctor Who collection. It's definitely worth watching all of it.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  Thanks for the offer but... I know there's torrents of the whole lot out there, but for me part of the enjoyment is buying the discs (at a slow pace, due to budget), ripping them, and watching them.

sebow 5y ago

If you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty, kodi is powerful and must-have software for consuming media in your home. However for the average user i might think it's a little bit overwhelming, of course this mainly depends on the wanted use.Plex might be suitable for most in that regard, emby used to be aswell though somehow they managed to fall a lot imo. Good companion apps for kodi are KDE-Connect, bubbleupnp, UMS Server.

yboris 5y ago

For browsing, previewing, searching, and organizing videos I created Video Hub App. The primary feature is scrub / preview thumbnails from inside the video as you hover with your mouse and an infinite scroll of all your videos. It also has a "filmstrip" view to see all screenshots at once. I hope it is useful to some of you here. https://videohubapp.com/en/ https://videohubapp.com/en/ Open source MIT: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

disqard 5y ago
Thank you for creating this! It's perfect for my current needs :) Do you use sqlite under the hood? Also, what's the largest collection / folder size that you know videohub can handle? Also, I just bought it anyway -- I am impressed at how you donate a generous portion of every sale to charity!
- yboris 5y ago
  The "file system" is stupid-easy: just a JSON file renamed to `.vha2` -- see the interface here: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfaces/final-object.interface.ts#L15 https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/blob/main/interfac... I've had no problems with 20,000 videos in a "hub" and I've heard people pushing past 100k. JavaScript has no problem applying .filter() across this many objects quickly. Each search is its own .filter method (inside an Angular pipe) so every search should be virtually instant. And since the screenshots are pre-extracted (the most time-consuming part of using the app), you should be able to infinite-scroll with no delays in loading previews.

Minor49er 5y ago

I have a few Fire Sticks that I got on sale. I installed Kodi on them. They read from a NAS that I also have that serves files via SMBv1/CIFS. It's super easy to stream music and movies locally now.

JetSpiegel 5y ago

Kodi already has a (passable) web interface, so it's possible to expose that externally and get on-premises Spotify and Netflix on the same interface. The main problem is that the remote control and the remote viewing interfaces are co-mingled, it's not very usable. There are alternative interfaces, but they are crappier.