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Comment by Cockbrand | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t used standalone Kodi, but with LibreELEC, I don’t share this experience. It runs really nicely on my Raspi 3, and I can control it via my TV‘s remote. It pretty much feels like it’s running on the TV itself instead of the (not so) smart built-in features. The UI is a bit slow at times, but definitely not annoyingly so. The default configuration is quite good and usable, and I didn’t feel the need to change much.

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Same and I'm running on a Pi2. It's been running flawlessly for 5-6 years at this point. I always cringe whenever I see just how unbelievably and unbearably slow some built in TV "smart" stuff is. It's especially unbelievable because my setup cost around £30 to "upgrade" my dumb TV (in fact, the Pi was just lying around surplus to requirement so basically free).

I have tried Plex and currently have Jellyfin set up. Plex I removed immediately due to "cloud" login (yes I know you can disable it, I did by removing it). Jellyfin is useful but I still find myself using Kodi directly as it just works.

I set up Kodi on a Pi about 9 years ago and more recently switched to a Le Potato (same SoC as the Kindle Fire). With a powered USB hub, a USB DVB-T receiver and a DVD reader, it's basically the same functionality as a smart TV and a DVD player (including streaming services since there's WideVine support). Before it was using OSMC, now LibreELEC.

It's super cheap, it's secure because it doesn't have any useless cloud services, and it can also play retro games on emulators (not using Kodi's gaming support though, it's very immature). Maintenance is zero except when I decide to do an upgrade, which is once every 3 years or so.

I don't even mind the cloud login. What killed Plex for me was the fact that it needs to re-encode the video on the fly if I turn on subtitles, and my poor computer couldn't keep up.

I switched to Kodi and it's been working great so far.

PlexKodiConnect is excellent if you want to share a library with other Kodi clients, and not mess around with a shared database. I'm glad I switch over to it.

Weird plex doesn't do that for me. I run plex on a rpi3b and everything plays (without encoding of course) at 4k with no issues. I use firestick as client.

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