Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System | Hacker News Reader

Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

kodi.tv

428 pointsdkobran341 comments

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?

This is fair, but I've found that I want to watch my content on a television instead of my computer monitor, since I already have everything set up. Unfortunately, it seems that there aren't many good options for just playing files on the network natively using Android TV alone.

It seems that a lot of people reach for Plex or similar in this situation, but setting up Plex requires a separate computer to serve the files. If all you want to do is play videos on your local network, then Kodi might be a suitable option, since it can run directly on hardware like smart TVs without the need to set up a separate computer.

I recommend using an HDMI cable. The inconvenience of threading a cable across the room is massively outweighed by the convenience of never having to deal with network issues, limited bandwidth, or introducing additional software issues you didn't already have before.

Ah, I see. I have a PC hooked up to my TV, which I use for the purposes mentioned in my post. I (perhaps erroneously) took it for granted that most people using these programs were doing the same.

This is probably beside the point, but thinking back, XBMC made a lot of sense back in 2003 when it was released. It wasn't as feasible to a) have an entire spare PC and b) hook it up to the TV easily. I certainly didn't have HDMI or even VGA on my TV back then, only composite and maybe component analog video...

I use a beamer instead of a tv but it is not complicated to dedicate a small computer like a gigayte brix or an old laptop and use the tv/beamer as the screen. Be it with kodi or using regular apps doesn't make a huge difference these days. With the advent of hidpi monitors, all modern OSes support scaling the icons/text/widgets so it is perfectly viewable from a few meters of distance.

I use a wireless keyboard+trackpad combo as a remote which I leave out of the way inside my living room table when not in use.

Why not just cast from your cellphone to Chromecast / AppleTV (free AirScreen app for Chromecast devices to accept signal from apple devices)

Besides the gaming desktop, and the two laptops, I also have a normal old school desktop for the TV.

And honestly, I don't see why that's not a common practice. Super easy to use.

No Android fiddling needed at all.

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.

> 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.

Who says thats not the part i love about my mame always something to do, and no Ive had both setups and kodi and plex suffer from the same config mess.

One path is to sit back and enjoy the music.

Another path is to go in search of a better way to enjoy the music.

Both have their value, but if you start down the path of looking for the better way, don't lose track of the original goal. Too many audiophiles are still listening to their equipment instead of the music.

(Same goes for people playing vintage video games, watching movies, writing things by hand with fountain pens, supporting sports teams... this is a core part of modern civilization, I think.)

It's the same experience with kodi if you buy one of the cheap amlogic tv boxes with it pre installed

That more sounds like a you problem. No reason to play around with your setup, if you don't want to. Just hook it up to a NAS and play your files, has been working fine here for +7 years

> 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 do the same on my PCs, however in my bedroom Kodi is king. I use it on a Raspberry PI which has a good CEC implementation, which means one can use both the TV and Kodi from the same remote: super convenient. I also have a Bluetooth keyboard with trackpad and a 2nd SD with Manjaro Linux ready, but they stay mostly unused. I'm in the process of replacing the RPi with a Chromebox, which has a much better desktop performance than the RPi, but have to wait for the CEC-HDMI external interface to arrive since the Chromeboxes don't support it.

> Want to watch a movie? Navigate to it in my file manager and play it with VLC.

That's how I use Kodi on an (otherwise) headless HTPC (a RPi) connected to my TV. You don't need to build and maintain a content library, plugins, etc. Select Videos - Files, navigate to a folder, select the file and enjoy.

> What are people's favorite "killer apps" for software like Kodi? Is it just convenience and I've have had bad luck?

Control via a TV remote and no need to hook up my laptop to the TV every time is a killer convenience feature for me.

Same. I have it installed in my Xiaomi mi tv (Android tv). Connected an external USB drive and it's good to go

I would never use kodi over mplayer on my pc.

...but on a raspberry, running libreelec and with a bluetooth remote? that is the real kodi killer use case

if im on my laptop and i know what i want to watch ill use the file manager since its definitely a lot quicker, otherwise i usually open up jellyfin because so i can get a synopsis of the movie and see the ratings.

kodi is definitely a bit complex at the best of times though. trying to set up the home screen and menus exactly how you like it can be very tedious and using the jellyfin plugin is just adding another layer of complexity on top of all that.

im thinking i might just try a plain OS soon that opens jellyfin media player app on boot. it probably wouldn't be able to do as many things from the remote as kodi but maybe something like that KDE Connect that your using might be the way to go when i have to do anything complicated

You can use jellyfin mpv shim to control any device connected to your home network as a screen with your jellyfin app on android acting as a remote.

Jellyfin on a plain OS is a good choice. I do it on a TV for friends and family (with a browser set for fullscreen). The Jellyfin app enables much control via other connected devices. People like it, and maintenance is ok (1 day per year, more if I want to add content more often).

I wanted to tinker with Proxmox so the Jellyfin server is virtualized, but running it directly on the host/hypervisor OS is probably a better choice in order to transcode with the GPU. GPU passthrough in Proxmox is not intuutive and I deemed it not worth the troubles for my use case.

I have a network storage shared with the different VMs and containers, an airsonic server, a podcast downloader (airsonic being not so good at that), a DNS, Kiwix, Calibre, Komga for use with Tachiyomi (lots of work to set up good content) and a few social games (pictionary, posio, codenames etc).

it's not exactly "all-purpose", but with laptop in hand and Linux connected to the tv...

`ssh user@host cat file.mkv | mplayer`

it's more one of those things that spark joy because of how weird it is, but I end up using it all the time.

waiting for a response about how you can then also transcode the video into ascii by piping in an extra command :)

no extra command but happy to ablidge: 'mplayer -vo caca'

I recently went on a dive into libcaca. Those devs are the heroes we need.

I'm using Kodi since several years for the family TV. I only had to tinker with the streaming buffer for YouTube, other than that it required no maintenance.

My wife can use it from her mobile. We can play movies for our kids or stream a YouTube-clip. I'm using a Firefox-addon to cast clips from my browser to Kodi. That's about it, no killer app, just convenient digital media on an old, dumb TV.

Only I'd wish Yatse was ported to iOS (Unless my wife's iPhone dies soon).

jellyfin completely replaced Kodi for me. much more reliable overall and useful across devices.

Maybe it's bad luck, maybe you're a fiddler? I've been using Kodi since first release on original xbox, when it was XBMC. I set it up like only a handful of times since, only when I installed new machine - it was original xbox, then a soare laptop, then a spare comouter, rpi3 and now latest being rPi4. OpenELEC image, a few plugins, youtube key and that's it. I enjoy it for having access to my video library, those few plugins and a single (TV) remote since it leaped from xbox to normal computers.

Only thing I don't like about it is that Netflix isn't on it.. but that's hardly Kodi's fault.

> I've been using Kodi since first release on original xbox, when it was XBMC.

It wouldn't be HN if I didn't correct you in that it was originally XBMP on the old Xbox, before it graduated to a media center.

It was a revelation in that the UI was amazing for the time, and the hardware was good enough to decode everything available.

I remember soldering in an extra IR eye so that I could power on and off the Xbox with the official Media Remote using a special key combination.

It wouldn't be HN if I didn't learn something new! I knew it only as XBMC. Even bought that damn IR plug and a remote for xbox. I played only a handful of games on it, but XBMC was in constant use.

I still switch it back to the XBMC-ish theme on Kodi. I think its called confluence.

Did you get it off #xbins? I think that was the only place to find binaries of it without building it yourself.

I was a heavy IRC user, and that does sound familiar, so that's very likely, but I don't really remember. It might as well have been from sourceforge or the (then) newly released Bittorrent.

> It was a revelation in that the UI was amazing for the time, and the hardware was good enough to decode everything available.

Almost. I had a set of ffmpeg scripts that would encode blu-rays at 720p just so so it would playback without any dropped frames. But yeah, everything else was fantastic.

> and now latest being rPi4. OpenELEC image, a few plugins, youtube key and that's it.

If you are interested in the latest Kodi, check out "libreelec" [0] a maintained fork of "openelec". "openelec" support was dropped in 2017 [1].

[0] https://libreelec.tv/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenELEC

>> Only thing I don't like about it is that Netflix isn't on it.. but that's hardly Kodi's fault.

My main use case for it actually was wanting to watch netflix, youtube and prime on my desktop monitor from my office couch. The two main issues were lack of a remote and the lack of native support in kodi for any of those streaming platforms. The first issue was solved with this nifty little unit: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WQG6A8C. The second was solved with a kodi plugin called web launcher. I had to mod the plugin to make it launch pages in kiosk mode on the leftmost of my dual displays (basically passing a custom command line to chrome), and I am not sure whether it has been updated for py3-based kodi.

coughs https://github.com/CastagnaIT/plugin.video.netflix/

https://github.com/Sandmann79/xbmc

https://github.com/anxdpanic/plugin.video.tubed

These might work better than using web launcher.

Thanks, for some reason didn't come across those when I was setting this up a couple years ago. I'll give them a try.

https://github.com/CastagnaIT/plugin.video.netflix/

Same, except I switched to mpv from vlc except for some cases like MIDI files.

I'm in a similar boat. I don't want a media center, I just want to be able to easily stream video from my PC with the highest picture quality (no unnecessary transcoding). Luckily I found an app[0] that does just that and does it well. Paid, but you can see the quality (only recurring issue is that the remote control app keeps disconnecting from my PC after a while).

[0]https://airflow.app/

It's harder to do this with a remote control, and harder to hand the remote to a visitor and say 'watch whatever ya want' because there's no direction and the options are infinite and wait I didn't mean to delete that and wtf why is it trying to reboot for an update I don't know the password aaaaagh.

There's room for both, they're targeting entirely different crowds.

But yes, I absolutely do this too, it's so much more flexible and lets me run sponsorblock and other plugins in youtube/twitch/some random site I just found. Those are the real killer features for me, so it's very unlikely that any media-center app will ever convert me.

Same, just using PotPlayer & Foobar2000

I quite like the convenience with the Kore remote for Android, great for my home cinema setup. But unfortunately updated packages on Ubuntu since moving, and now audio doesn't work. I really hate Linux audio, what a mess >_<

> 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.

I have been doing this all the time with Kodi. Just disable media scanning and browse through. I'm sold on Kodi because for years it has been the only way to watch video on my Linux NUC without tearing, it digests every media I can throw at it, and it's overall just very easy to configure and use.

This is a similar approach to when i used it long ago when it was xmbc. My media is well organised on my file system so I'd point xmbc at a smb share and navigate from there.

What made Kodi/xbmc great was the interface worked better on a couch using a game controller to navigate versus a traditional desktop where i'd be forced to use a keyboard+mouse.

The thing that bothers me the most is that file browser is behind 4..5 clicks while it should be there as first-class menu.

Also, file lists order folders and files independently.

If not for those two things, Kodi would be perfect.

Generally agree, but you can set a shortcut from the main menu to file browser.

I googled a bit and yes, there does seem to be a way to configure a top-level file browser with super favourites add-on. For sorting, I see nothing appropriate, though.

So, yes, Kodi is flexible, but too tricky for leisure use.

Kodi is very flexible and you can make the menus behave just like you want. Setting it up can take a bit of fooling around to figure out but it's quite straight-forward once it clicks.

I have configured mine to go to file manager when I press 'f' on the keyboard. You may not have a keyboard attached but it might be worth your while.

A key feature of Kodi for me is that it syncs the TV frame rate to the video that is playing. I don't know any other players on Linux that do that.

I've been opening 4k HDR files over wifi and having Kodi "just work" on my Android based smart tv.

Same here, I've been using PotPlayer with MadVR for years on Windows. HDR, resolution and framerate matching worked beautifully, long before Windows had proper support for HDR. Even now, some HDR content just looks wrong in other media players.

MadVR know their stuff, they recently announced a very expensive home theatre video processor [1].

[1]: https://madvrenvy.com/

I use Kodi on my computer with Tiny Media Manager, and loving it so far. Yes, it's not a TV on a living room setup, but being able to browse what I have with good metadata is a much better experience for me, so far.

I have found with 4K tvs the cursor and UI is annoyingly tiny.

Currently I'm using the ATV 4K and Infuse (and MBP SMB share) for "other" content. Works a dream.

In Kodi's settings you can specify a lower resolution for the menus. Not sure if that changes the controls overlay during playback though.

Kodi is indeed overkill I find. As some have mentioned, point it to SMB share and be done. uPnP/DLNA sucks.

What I liked much better than Kodi was WiiMC on the original Wii. It was similar in that you point at a SMB share and just go, but navigating with a wiimote was pleasurable in its own right. Made for a nicer experience.

One day I will invest some time and see if there is a PC equivalent to WiiMC that runs on modern hardware and supports modern codecs.

This is why people use all in one solutions that you basically can’t mess up, like Apple TV.

Using Kodi in my tv box and setup SMB to a shared folder on my Windows laptop. It was an easy setup and pretty frictionless later. I usually still use VLC to get the subtitles upfront saved with the same filename as the video file. Whatever I get in my laptop I can see in the TV later. Chromecast is also an option, not sure if there's some quality loss in that case.

Totally agree. All I want is "here my files, let me pick one". And KODI make me to choose genres, directors, stars, movie length, all this stuff. Need to do many clicks just to browse directory/dlna. And it's laggy.

All of that is strictly optional; you can browse in a local or remote folder and use it just like a traditional video player+file browser in that sense.

Nothing wrong with that, whatever works for you!

I did have similar experiences with Kodi in the past. What I realized is that many plugins are of really poor quality and can mess up Kodi in very unexpected ways - the way issues manifest may not hint at a plugin being at fault. No sandboxing and a bunch of dubious Python modules. And that's besides all the possible security issues.

Nowadays I just have a basic skin + JellyConn and it's been very solid and smooth.

The Kodi plugin ecosystem is really alluring with all the possible features but it's a can of worms. Kodi itself is quite stable and predictable otherwise, in my experience.

EDIT: Oh, and I don't have much to say about Kodi media library organization - it seems a bit finicky so I'd do that either manually like you're already doing or with some other software more suited for it (Sonarr+Radarr/Jellyfin/any other good recommendations?)

Yes, it's a struggle. I fell-back to just using TV's browser for watching almost anything.

It does sound like you've had slightly-more-than-average bad luck (I had some similar problems occasionally when I had Kodi on an RPi3, but it's been flawless for a year or so after I upgraded to RPi4), but you're certainly not wrong!

One point to consider, though, is that most TVs don't have built-in file managers (or, indeed, NAS-connection capability) - for folks who prefer to watch their media on a big screen, you need some client that can a) connect to your storage location, and b) play it out over HDMI etc. For me, Kodi is the best-functioning of those options.

If you're content with watching on a laptop/PC screen (or if your PC has your TV as an AV-out), however, then you're golden and there's nothing that Kodi really does over-and-above to make it worthwhile.

EDIT: Ah, I see[1] you do indeed have a PC connected to your TV. In which case - yeah, there's no reason not to do what you're doing!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634830

May i ask what flavour of kodi you're using with your RPi4? OpenELEC, LibreELEC?

Not OP, but LibreELEC is pretty much where it's at right now.

Not the parent, but I've been using the kodi-rpi out of the archlinuxarm repos.

https://archlinuxarm.org/packages/armv7h/kodi-rpi

OSMC latest release works fine for hevc 4k content

LibreELEC, off the top of my head - though (ironically, given the conversation being about the constant need for tinkering and fixing in solutions that should be robust) I'm away from my home right now, and my VPN is down so I can't ssh in to check :P

I've found OSMC to be great, even on RPi2. I tried LibreELEC recently and couldn't get live TV to work acceptably with a USB TV tuner (glitchy). I ended up somewhat going down a rabbit hole of USB isochronous/asynchronous/buffering settings but just went back to OSMC.

You can also use apt to customize OSMC because it's based on Debian[1].

The maintainer, Sam Nazarko seems really helpful too.

[1] https://osmc.tv/wiki/general/installing-packages-via-apt/

"Most TV's don't have built-in file managers"

Lack of a built in file manager on any device is an excellent indicator of "how bad the manufacturer is trying to reduce your freedom."

True, but irrelevant to the conversation at hand. And also ironic, given that most HNers decry smart TVs and yearn for a return to "just a screen", without apps (including file managers).

You're missing it entirely. They want "just a screen" precisely so that they can use whatever they want on it, including filemanagers if they wish.

Moreover, they correctly understand what the TV industry works so hard to obscure. It's computers all the way down. If you're gonna slap a computer on my screen, then let me use it as a general purpose computer. If, however, you insist on putting a computer on my screen that I hate, then make it easy for me to avoid it.

And of course, we know why they don't do this -- the low cost of the TV is subsidized by the data they sell to others gained by spying on you.

I'm not sure how we're managing to agree so much on overall direction/motivation, while seeming to contradict one another.

> They want "just a screen" precisely so that they can use whatever they want on it, including filemanagers if they wish.

Yep - and if the screen is "just a screen" (i.e. has no file manager or other media-interfacing functionality on it), there there will need to be some _other_ computer in the stack of "computers all the way down" to provide the media-interface. For me, Kodi does that job perfectly well, but it doesn't work well for everyone.

> the low cost of the TV is subsidized by the data they sell to others gained by spying on you.

Yes, this is an uncontroversial statement of a distasteful truth.

Many TVs have DLNA, which you could use to play content off a NAS - if it ever worked properly. It's such an unloved standard.

VLC can be installed on most smart tvs and has excellent DLNA support. I still use plex but have DLNA as a backup when the internet goes out (better local network connectivity)

One of mine does, but it only handles MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio...kinda useless when your videos are all H.264 with a variety of audio codecs.

Maybe newer TVs (this one's 10 years old) have support for more codecs, but I'm not inclined to replace it when it otherwise continues to work well. I'll just drive it with a Raspberry Pi running Kodi and call it good.

Similarly, I spent ~£2000 on having a wonderful home cinema setup (meticulously organised kodi library on a dedicated HTPC, surround-sound, projector) -- but it’s mostly collecting dust because chromecast’ing netflix from my phone to the TV is so much more convenient.

I’m really hoping that Matter’s open casting protocol takes off, and we can get a new generation of software that combines the best of "self-hosted open-source interoperable ecosystem" and “one tap on the phone to have something playing on the big screen”...

Thats why I switched to plex. Being able to chromecast makes it possible to use any of my tv's not just the one that had the pc connected. I now run chromecast's only and a plex server.

I don't even use a GUI. I use mpv with a wireless keyboard. There have been weird multichannel codec passthrough issues no matter what player I am using, like ... if the 5.1 signal says 'side left' then nothing comes out of my 5.1 system 'rear left'. WTF... but once they are fixed, they are fixed forever in a profile.

> ... 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.

This 100%. Mini PC's are cheap and hook to TVs just as easily.

Years back A friend who lived int he country side wanted to watch a specific Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. I had it on my server at home and I also happened to have my Linux laptop with me. So I plug my laptop into the TV, sshfs mounted my servers video directory and played it using VLC on his big screen. Took maybe 5 minutes to setup and he was thoroughly impressed that I have "my own streaming service".

I used to have a laptop connected to my TV that I controlled with a small wireless keyboard. It wasn't VLC but MPC, but mostly the same as you're doing.

Then someone advised me on buying a nVidia Shield on which I put Kodi. And from there it was a completely different experience. Just controlling everything from a remote with my thumb, on a unified interface, with more information (posters, synopsis, status of viewing, resuming, sync with my Trakt[1] profile...) Then I bought a Logitech Harmony remote, so I was able to control my whole setup (TV + soundbar + nVidia Shield) with a single remote.

But I had more and more issues with Kodi, plugins failing, crashes... and with Netflix I took the habit of being able to resume somewhere (browser, smartphone) else what I started on the TV. Something not supported by Kodi because it's only a local player. So I looked at Plex and my experience improved even more.

Now with Plex I have my own "Netflix" so I can start something in a browser at work, resume it on my smartphone in the bus and finish it in my couch on my TV at home. And I can share this with friends and family! I don't have to ask them for a USB key to share files. Or setup a weird FTP access for them to download the files. They have a nice UI to do what they want : consume a media file that they know I have. It's accessible from everywhere : browsers, smartphone, tablets, media box, smart TV... And I can even play my own music on my Sonos players!

There's a lot of things for which I like to hack stuff and all that. But I don't want to have to do that to watch a movie. I want a simple and user-friendly UX. And that's exactly what Kodi and even more Plex offers.

So to me the first and biggest game changer was to have a smartphone-like experience on my TV, with a small device in one hand I was able to switch apps and enjoy my media in a nice UI.

[1] : https://trakt.tv/

I am either old school or lazy; I just cannot bother with learning a new system and maintaining it all.the.time. So yes, PC is my hammer, and I just double click on what I want to watch. Ir just works.

(typically when I mention this, somebody will helpfully pipe up that "It's easy! You just need to download this, that and other thing; open up these ports; setup the server and TV on its VLAN; make sure that these drivers and codecs are installed and updated; etc etc etc" with zero awareness of how much extra work it is compared to "double click on movie file" :D )

Similar ending for me as well. There were quite often issues with plugins and I ended up sshing in the machine via phone and starting the movies/series that way.

I played with kodi for a week or two then went back to vlc and shell scripts.

I run apache and dump videos for the family in a web root and everyone knows that media.local gets them to the files - everything can play mp4 as is at this point (vlc if you want to be fancy or just a regular browser), even the boys firestick/silk has zero issue playing back FullHD 1080 mp4 in browser.

Total maintenance time averaged over a year, 2 minutes.

Wireless controller support isn't an issue I have a wireless keyboard with a touchpad built in and that is the "TV remote".

This is exactly my experience as well. Just hook up a PC/RPI to a TV via HDMI with a wireless keyboard-mouse combo. Install VLC and a web browser, auto-mount an optional NFS/SAMBA share and... done. This covers 95 percent of my use cases for myself and non-technical users.

Agreed. (but I use sshfs+userify with an automount for sshfs) And VLC, so no more fighting to set up HDMI audio. I would love to know how to set up Dolby Atmos, though, but VLC has some great configuration options for various pass-thru.

I use Plex (Kodi) like system for the phone and for other people. In practice I far more often use mpv on the terminal to start movies.

For the music part, seriously check out MusicBee. Try it in Theatre Mode.

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?

No.

Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.

Why?

Every feature seems simple by itself, but considering the overall scope and the maintenance effort, you will need dozends of people working full time on this. (I worked at such a very for profit media tech company)

Because people want a massive piece of software for free and "expect it". I mean we would all love to have what you typed out there but it would be a massive effort and not likely to happen anytime soon. Jellyfin and Calibre do a lot of what you have there but probably not even the majority of it and certainly not flawlessly

The scope gets bloated and the app unfocused. Most people wouldn’t read eBooks or comics from a big screen interface for example, but use a dedicated app for that. Keeping a cinema app primarily focused on video means it is leaner and meaner for the majority use case.

Is this sarcasm? I don't mean any disrespect or negativity, I just don't understand. I'm not familiar with this space, but I don't see why the aforementioned expectations are unrealistic. The only issue I can imagine is big media companies strong arming a player in this space (which I assume is what happens to existing companies mentioned). There's nothing technically impossible mentioned.

I’d rather the app be a master of one than a jack of all trades

Plex is very good when it comes to “just works” for media consumption. That “just works” experience (API enrichment, artwork sourcing, device verification etc.) isn’t easy to maintain.

That's totally fair. I also definitely agree that IJW is difficult. And people want different things, and have different ideas of what "It Just Works" means. I was just curious about what about the previously mentioned requests were unreasonable.

Ebooks, photos and emulators? In my opinion they don't belong in my cinema app.

I agree! But, objectively, someone does think they belong. That's beside the point. I was curious if there are technical, business, or political (or something else) reasons why it's not possible (either theoretically or practically).

Objectively someone has a subjective opinion...

Technically photos and emulators have been a part of the whole for quite some time now already. The media center is evolving and games are a part of what people have begun to expect to be able to access as part of their ten foot interface. eBooks? Now that is where I too question things.

I don't know the use case where being able to read eBooks from the television is desirable. It certainly doesn't meet my definition of shared entertainment, which is something that media centers are intended for. They're media, yes, and they can be organized, sure--but is there a common use case for reading from the large screen? Unless one is disabled, I really don't see one.

However if looking for a better merge of Kodi and gameplaying I cannot recommend Batocera enough. It has a large retrocomputing (emulation) capability and also supports many DOS games and Windows games via dosbox or wine and has recently added Steam integration. On the media side of things it can be configured to automatically load kodi and seamlessly transition from Kodi to the Emulation Station frontend.

There will be some configuration but once configured it has in my experience generally stayed configured well and can be a set and forget type of appliance if you take the time to organize your games and media and then leave it alone after scraping. Also it's been one of the easiest configurations I've done in a long time. I encourage everyone to look into it.

Almost everything is technically possible. But I don't think that "ebooks, pdfs, cbz, cbr, etc." reader is a reasonable requirement for a media center. Or an emulator. They start complaining that software is bloated to appeal the community, and then request more bloat, but to their particular wants.

Yes, almost everything is technically possible. I agree with the first three sentences. I don't have an opinion on the last.

Again, I was just curious if there was any reasons I couldn't think of why the top-level's comments were unfulfillable! I'm always curious about people's desires that (apparently) can't (or won't) be solved with software. This is a space I'm not too familiar with, but there doesn't seem to be any technical reasons why someone should have desires that get pushed against.

Certainly there may be practical reasons, I just wanted to try to pinpoint it a little bit. As an example - although I don't personally see much value in it - the audiobook thing seems like a relatively simple addition that I could see value in. I use Spotify for music, news, podcasts, and audiobooks (the last one is a lie, but I did discover there are audiobooks on Spotify to help my point). I could see the value in having these all on my tv - I just don't have one. But if I were in a situation where the tv was the typical media center, why not have it play audiobooks? It's actually a rather ideal platform for common audiobook consumption. As a recent comment somewhere here mentioned, people (presumably) tend to listen to audiobooks somewhat in the background. It seems handy to have a giant screen that could visibly show the current and recent text in an easy way. I find myself sometimes watching or listening to something where I have a momentary lapse in comprehension and I have to scrobble (do people use that term? Scroll? Seek?) a few seconds back to get the "umph" of a scene, sentence, or general point. If I were someone that listened to audiobooks while cleaning around the house or something, it seems handy to quickly read the missing few words to get the point rather than looking for my phone, unlocking it, looking for whatever app is playing the audiobook, getting distracted by other open apps, getting back to the audiobook app, and rewinding well past the point I missed because scrobbling across a 2 inch wide screen for a 10 hour book by a minute is impossible.

Weird rant. I have no horse in this. Just unemployed and this happened to mentally stimulate me I guess.

But I guess I could always just try mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.[0] :)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Edit: I'm leaving the usage as-is, but I seem to have used "scrobble" incorrectly. I think "seek" is probably the correct term. For some reason just yesterday I was thinking about "scrobbling" and I misremembered its functionality. Oops!

The limit are resources: mainly time and human [will] power.

Why merge Spotify with Netflix? Just have two apps and services, is not that difficult for the user, nor a real nuissance. The OP didn't request audiobooks. He specifically asked also for PDF, a comic format (CBR) and "etc.". That, I guarantee you, lead to further requests (highlite the PDFs, a unified comic/pdf/movie/music storage and showroom, screencap, sharing...). Add a lot of underlying complexity, bugs, cost in manteinance, extra mental load...

As for the "ideal audiobook reader platform" let me tell you something: audiobooks are consumed by people while walking, running, driving, at the gym, in the sub... I've never heard of anyone planted in front of the reader just hearing the audiobook. The nature of audiobooks is "hear a book while doing something else", and a TV goes against exactly that. A TV audiobook is called "a movie" or "a serie", something that you can already watch in Kodi.

This reminds me of the "4 star but..." in the App Stores. Lots and lots of users of a nice free app comment like "I LOVE the app, but I only rate it with 4 stars unless you add this little, small, really tiny thing that I want. If you do that, I will come back and give you the 5th star".

Re: scrobbling, I think you are thinking of scrubbing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrubbing_(audio)

I agree with the parent comment, Software that tries to be everything to everyone always sucks.

I think the Emby's, Kodi's, and Plex's of the world should focus on the "home Theater" space, making the best experience for the consumption of Movies and TV Shows. maybe music if they want to stretch

There should be separate apps for ebooks, podcasts, etc. I do not (and I am sure very few do) consume ebooks, and podcasts on my Large TV. That is where the "home theater" apps should focus, the TV Watching experience.

I understand sometimes people use a computer monitor, or even a mobile app to view it but I would image that is an edge case, and should not be the focus, when I want to watch a movie I am doing it on my 60in screen not my 5.5in

More features == more complexity, likely a worse user experience, a huge maintenance overhead, and so much surface area for bugs. Not to mention the black hole that would swallow trucks of cash in terms of development time. Even simple, very purposeful apps are hard to design well. And so many of these features are insanely complicated, even if you don’t realize it. My Plex media library is currently 70TBs of movies and tv shows and it works flawlessly with about 15 active users. I’m very happy with that.

I have to agree. Most of this can already be done by something like JellyFin. But once you start branching into understanding podcast, emulators, comicbooks, & personal photos, you're no longer talking about a single app.

If your goal is organization, there are plenty of other tool specific to the individual purposes. If your goal is consumption kodi can server as a launcher to other applications. Adding the functionality is techincally possible but would require addons.

On the other hand, there are open source options for most of this stuff. Jellyfin probably gets you about half of the list, and you can set up dedicated software for much of the rest with a little effort.

It's interesting that the parent expects this to all be a single piece of software. Is this a generational thing? It's the opposite of the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy I grew up on.

I like Jellyfin a lot but I actually sometimes feel like it tries to do too much.

Putting it in a list makes it's pretty clear how much people are expecting from these "media theater" servers, yet it's kind of depressing to get backslash from wanting to "go commercial".

I find it already pretty incredible we have so advanced solutions mostly open source. I mean, as commercial software I only used Apple's offering (FrontRow ?), it was financed by an already pretty strong company who had all the incentives to make it a compelling thing, and it only did a tenth perhaps of what is requested there. Doesn't feel like a surprise if Plex was trying to get more funding to keep the product dev ongoing for the next years.

I was most disappointed when they got rid of the cloud sync and things. Servers should sync between each other easily, but they don't. And the plex channels are mostly worthless, the entire point of plex is for people to bring their own content.

I'm also not a big fan of the youtube algorithm. It would be super nice just to have a "channel first"/"category first" way of viewing youtube instead of an "algorithm that knows better than you".

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.

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.

If you put jellyfin's sqlite DB onto an NVMe drive, its speed instantly skyrockets and becomes very usable.

Is there an open source thing that can act like a Chromecast but run on, say, a NUC and output to an arbitary gstreamer pipeline or some other foo?

I remember seeing a few open source projects like that, but the issue was Chromecast requires DRM for apps like Netflix. Some like Plex and YouTube would work fine.

Maybe you could run it through a capture card and pipe that to whatever, but it's a lot more expensive.

This sounds like an OS, not a program. Maybe try connecting your laptop to the TV as an external monitor.

Auto subtitle downloads? Come now if you are only watching rips of your own legally purchased media the subs would be available to you already… unless you aren’t.

Seriously though you are asking a lot here.

That's been a plex feature since day 1 (?)

this already exists in jellyfin

> Come now if you are only watching rips of your own legally purchased media the subs would be available to you already…

I can't figure out how to get subtitles for stuff I DVR off my OTA TV so this would be nice for me and I am not a pirate.

I think Plex does this outta the box lol.

Just buy a google chromecast with google tv and install VLC on it.

No games or mame but everything else on the list is covered. Kodi is fun but having to educate the non technical household members how to use it is not fun.

Thats what killed the old HTPC concept for me. Too much fiddling, not enough watching.

How does this work? Where is the media hosted?

Chromecast nearly cracks this problem, but playing local media has always needed weird fragile browser extensions in my experience.

The newer Chromecast(Chromecast with Google TV) has a redesigned Android TV interface with a smart remote. The older chromecast you didn't really have any interface to interact with it aside from sending a signal from your phone to control it remotely.

In this case I believe the above commenter was just implying to use your home PC as your Media server, install VLC on the Chromecast with Google TV, and then play the media back on the Chromecast via the Network share.

Yes, a raspberry pi with a usb drive running samba and minidlna.

I started with an old nslu2, the pi on my network is slug5, as its the fifth machine that has done this job over about 15 years or so.

VLC installed on the chromecast works well with the little remote control, so local media is no harder than netflix or prime.

Edit: the original streamer I used was a Neuston mc-500, which could access network files. The nslu2 was a little slow, but 15 years ago media files were much smaller too. You could record digital tv with a usb dongle and play it back on the neuston which amazed me at the time.

Edit2: the kids had hacked PS2s in their bedrooms that had media players on them that pulled data from the nslu2 as well. It was cool, cheap and worked well.

As @lajamerr tries to clear up, "chromecast" has now fallen victim to google's incredulous renaming/rebranding tradition.

Chromecast is now either the action you take to "beam" from your handheld device to a TV or an AndroidTV/GoogleTV/Chromecast hybrid device.

Just went to the google store to find a link for you and had some trouble finding what I'm talking about and apparently chromecast devices are now considered part of the Nest family complicating things even more.

https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv_com...

Edit: I stand somewhat corrected... there still is a chromecast device that comes without AndroidTV. I guess this just further illustrates my point about how bad/confusing google's naming and branding strategy is.

I've actually put Kodi on my Chromecast with Google TV. Put the things my parents watch on the favorites and remove all the other menu items and they can use it fine.

Plex supports a lot of this as paid features.

Nope.

So I found that the only way to get a media solution was to compromise.

I thought I needed a media server / streamer. Not sure why. Maybe because I started with Plex years ago, and that's what it is. I dropped Plex because I don't trust them, and they force me to log into their service.

I switched to Jellyfin because it's the most recommended alternative (and is a more 'free' fork of Emby). But I thought it was garbage. It had extremely slow media indexing, to the point where it was unusable. What made that worse was that there was no feedback in the UI telling me what files it was choking on, and its logs are abysmal. It's basically a black box, and it just gets stuck constantly. After about 2 weeks flogging a dead horse I gave up.

Right now I run Kodi on a raspberry pi 4, which sits behind my TV. It's not a server or streamer, it's a media player. But you know what? That's fine. Because it just works. It's hooked up to a 4TB USB disk. It boots off an m2 SSD in a USB enclosure. I ditched the chromecast, and installed an Android app to control Kodi. Best part is that it's just a computer with all my media on it so I can just use a keyboard+mouse and navigate to files if I want.

If I wanted a 2nd or 3rd TV, honestly I'd just duplicate the setup and use Syncthing to keep media in sync between them, giving the added benefit of data redundancy.

How does your Rpi connect to the TV, HDMI? How do you control the TV, through CEC?

Wondering why you wouldn't consider adding a NAS/SMB into the mix if you were adding a 2nd or 3rd head to the mix instead of syncing across disks?

I have a NAS, but it's old. Perfectly good as a backup though, so I keep the pi in sync with it.

As for the pi, it's connected straight to the TV's HDMI. It has a 7.1 USB audio that connects it to an ancient Yamaha receiver. I have no other media sources, and the TV is one of those digital signage models that has no smart features or tuners. So there's nothing complicated to do really. The Pi puts the screen to sleep when there's nothing playing.

https://firecore.com/infuse

Very nice! Never heard of this but gave it a go and it looks promising.

I'm already using VLC and accessing content via local network, but this looks a lot more polished and always good to have a backup/alternative.

My favorite feature is the ability to stream media from OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox etc. I just throw my movies/shows in my OneDrive and stream it from Infuse, saving the space on my laptop!

Funny, from my perspective about 50% of the features you list I would consider "spending time developing things I don't want".

I guess it depends on the perspective. For me, just wanting to stream movies from my NAS anywhere Plex works beautifully.

> 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

I've stopped using it at home because it keeps on wanting to transcode files for me even if I configured it not to and having gigabit ethernet. And it destroys my server's CPU doing so since I'm not that rich to have a spare video card around.

That's because you put files in that are in formats no browser can play. Next time, try obtaining h264+AAC in mp4 container instead.

this!

if you want your media to be playable basically everywhere, use h264/AVC.

sure a hvec-file would be about half the size but who cares?

Even HEVC works depending on the client support; for example, I stream h.265/HEVC to my 4K TV and it decodes it just fine. (Which makes me wonder what formats the OP has things stored in that plex has to transcode, or what client device they're using)

Most anime releases are 10-bit h265/HEVC in Matroska container with ASS subtitles (which are a huge mess anyway and should stop being used), which isn’t supported anywhere at all.

Yes, what are doing the devs? They should spend more time working for my own needs on their free time for their free software! /s

I've found Plex to be decently capable for all the things I want EXCEPT ONE.

For whatever bizarre reason, Plex all but requires you conform to specific filename formats. I don't why, but this pisses me off to no end.

What's the point of having elaborate media containers like MKV if you can't just point to an arbitrarily named file, process, fill-in, or read the metadata and have it added to your library? I mean, Plex maintains a database, can read metadata, pull info from moviedb, tag stuff, categorize... what's up with the obsession on filenames?

The reason for the file naming convention is for metadata matching. All they are really doing behind the scenes is searching the movie name (and possibly year) from a metadata provider. The files you obtain online or rip yourself themselves rarely have any metadata in the file so the only remaining option is to parse the filename/directory structure.

Right, that's understandable, but many folks prefer to not rename files.

I would like to be able to just point to a file and tell Plex what that file is so it "knows" (puts it in it's database). If it can read/write metadata on the file itself, that would be great too.

> but many folks prefer to not rename files.

That's like arguing that they prefer an unsorted pile of thousands of books vs. a library/bookstore. I mean if that's how they want it then fine, but you don't get the useful features.

There are a multitude of metadata managers out there which don't require the same directory structure but they are a load more effort than automatic metadata matching and a lot more effort than simply organizing your media in the first place.

> For whatever bizarre reason, Plex all but requires you conform to specific filename formats. I don't why, but this pisses me off to no end.

Idk, on Kodi I had to rename my files a certain way for them to be associated with metadata from IMDB & all, so I was used to having Filebot[1] doing the job for me. When I switched to Plex, I didn't even think about it, I kept renaming my files with Filebot. Also I prefer the light and clearer pattern that is resulting from Filebot instead of having weird filenames depending on the release.

[1] : https://www.filebot.net/

Yeah, I got filebot now too. I wish it didn't have to exist, but Plex practically demands it!

The answer is simple: not every media file is an MKV that has metadata inside it.

Your solution works for MKV files. The Plex solution works for all file types and containers.

It's easy to see why Plex would prefer this way.

Yeah but Plex, I believe, also maintains it's own database for the media files. Why can't I just "tell it" the metadata in those cases and leave the filenames as is?

Why don't you?

It has an edit button in the UI for entering in the metadata to its database manually.

It has the option to prefer metadata already stored locally inside the container when populating its database.

It has the "match" button for interactively discovering and retrieving the metadata from an agent like IMDb or tvdb regardless of filename.

By default it tries to spare you having to do any of these things, but they put a lot of work into facilitating several alternatives when you'd rather do the work yourself.

In my own use case, I rip blurays, and these don't have the metadata populated. Files won't even appear in the UI if the filename isn't right, or it guesses completely wrongly based on just the filename. There is tucked away, really deep, some options for "unmatched" files. I had moved on to using filebot before trying that.

Still your question should be "why didn't I?" which only you can answer, not "why can't I?" You could.

My requirements towards one solution is almost the same as yours. I've tried for a (relative) long time with jellyfin since I don't like the half-assed selfhosted/commercial approach from plex. I think jellyfin works great for:

* multi-user with setting limits and access * multiple devices * chromecasting everything * native apps (the one for firetv works perfect) * meta data scrapping * automatic subtitle downloading and managing * creating playlists and collections

I tried using jellyfin also for: * music * audiobooks * ebooks but without any satisfactory success. I now use calibre-online for ebooks and am yet to find something good for audiobooks/music.

I don't think you will ever find a PERFECT selfhosted completely opensource tool for everything and by now i think that's fine.

Goddamn that list escalated from “that makes sense” to “homers car from the Simpsons” quickly. I

Plex can do most of the first few things you list without issue.

- movie access - chrome cast - metadata - supports movies/tv (why would you want it to support random videos? Such a weird request) - automatic subtitles AFAIK these all work out of the box

It also supports photo libraries but imo, it’ shouldn’t. Podcasts, again Are feature creep. Audiobooks can be setup and work wonderfully, it just takes a little bit of work and an app like “prologue” on iOs (a fucking amazing app imo)

Your next point about supporting a cornucopia of obscure audio formats is insane imo.

Eboo also make absolutely no sense.

Emulator support? this can’t be serious.

Ultimately, I don’t always agree with the new features that are prioritized, but Plex overall is an amazing app. They also have released really great quality of life features recently too, like skipping intros in tv shows is such a cool idea, and it works really well imo. Also, IPTV/ dvr support has been improving rapidly.

Nothing is ever going to support your list of requirements, and even if something did, it would be such a bloated mess.

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.

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.

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.

Keep circulating the tapes!

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.

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

The OGs were using Hauppage WinTV & ATI AIWs long before Xbox was released.

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.

For your consideration, Jellyfin. [0]

[0] https://jellyfin.org/

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.

Jellyfin is actually a fork of Emby, created after Emby went closed source.

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.

There's actually ongoing work on extremely efficient tooling for thumbnails/previews :)

That's good to hear!

For jellyfin, that is. For emby, I doubt they’ll manage to even copy the technique

They work very well together. There are two different Kodi plugins that make Kodi into a Jellyfin player.

I personally prefer JellyCon as it’s more lightweight and works smoother for low-resource devices. Jellyfin-Kodi has more features and deeper integration with the library.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-kodi

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellycon

I'm still on Emby only because it "just works" with Chromecast, but the second Jellyfin gets that sorted, I'm moving over.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Emby and Google are non-options for me but I can understand choosing it for a feature that's critical for you.

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/ [1] https://radarr.video/ [2] https://lidarr.audio/ [3] https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett

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.

Ditto. Has ALL the codecs. Listening to music on it right now (Stars of the Lid).

There's also OSMC, which is minimal Debian + Kodi.

I'm such a fan of osmc. I used to run it on a raspberry pi, and then switched to their vero2 box when they released it.

I'm part of the LibreElec converts. Great package.

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.

+1 for LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi. Zero hassle, zero fiddling, everything just works, and it feels like it's built into the TV as it uses its IR remote as the only input device.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/ , one of the original services for tunneling local multiplayer online.

Around the same time, 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.

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.

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.

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/

Open source MIT: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

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!

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/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.

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

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.

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/, 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/) 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), that supports nearly every feature to be controlled remotely via script or App and has a pretty nice webinterface.

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?

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.

Can you elaborate? Are you saying there is FUD against Kodi or XBMC or BY them?

4-5 (ish?) Years ago there was a lot of media coverage about how kodi was a "piracy app" because some cheap set tops were shipping it with bundled torrent (etc) plugins. There were various legal threats against the project itself. Worth searching for in hn archives, lots of good discussion about it and how much of a coordinated smear campaign it was/n't.

To show just how much the XBMC Foundation is against using their work for piracy:

They chose the name Kodi because it was the most protectable trademark they could claim, which opened an avenue for them to sue the drop-shippers for trademark violation.

I feel they’re in the same position Dolphin is - attempting to keep a center of respectability above what everyone knows the product is actually used for.

The emulation scene is more extra than I can handle atm, so I'll focus more on the XBMC Foundation:

What more can they do? They make a legal product with plenty of legal and licensed uses and they did their due diligence to prevent piracy via their product as much as possible. They also did so without being hostile to customers and unnecessarily locking-down their plugin system.

A little virtue signaling can go a long way sometimes.

Piracy is a moral obligation.

Why?

Piracy is the only way to disarm this immoral system where all the "legal" alternatives are basic assaults on our consumer rights that leaves us with no real good ethical choice,

Your comment makes sense only to someone who already agrees with you and is similarly informed/misinformed. It does not provide any insight to those not sharing the same knowledge as you.

Right off the bat, anyone can contest:

- "only"

- "immoral"

- "assaults"

- "ethical"

Your comment provides no context or support for any of these.

If you want an essay, we can agree to a rate and I can write it after you send me the check.

If you want people to "disarm an immoral system", you're not going to get far if you want to be paid to convince them.

"One should not use X!"

"Why?"

"Pay me and I'll explain!"

I don't want to convince them of anything.

I'm not entirely sure, but perhaps there's an argument to be made that since it's pretty much the only way to get DRM free copies of certain materials piracy at times is justified.

Intellectual property is theft by the corporations — it is literally charging us to partake in our own culture. And if you’re a creator and create something derivative, expect tens of thousands in a legal judgement against you just because you’re a creative fan. Even decades after the creator is dead, and can no longer benefit.

>it is literally charging us to partake in our own culture

If I create something it's not your culture unless I decide to share it.

If you agree to erase your memory of all culture surrounding you and to create truly from blank than your statement could have some sense.

The culture around our current set of movies very very very likely wouldn't exist without for profit markets for that IP. Sorry my blood, sweat, tears in making new items isn't "free" for you to take unless I release it as free (which I certainly have in the past). I mean you can steal it obviously because it's an IT product but that doesn't make it moral at least not in my culture.

The current set of movies wouldn't be possible without thousands of years of myths, legends, stories and other fiction that was in public domain when these movies were made. Are you willing to pay countries royalties for their myths and legends.

Mel Gibson definitely ripped off the Bible in Passion of the Christ. He should pay royalties to the one true church.

You know the one.

But I’m not sure what the Discordians would do with all that money.

Campaign to get ddate back on most distros?

To the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster obviously.

It generally wouldn’t be piratable if you chose to never release it at all.

Just by creating it? Indeed, that doesn't necessarily make it my culture.

However, it does become my culture once my entire city is plastered with posters for it, its music plays on every radio twice a day, my children play with toys based on its characters, and/or conversations with my friends refer to it years after the thing came out.

Because we still have DRM in 2021.

It's disgraceful.

The Walt Disney Company. One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

I don’t see much of an issue with Disney getting paid for the new content they produce. If I want to watch the new Bad Batch episodes, I can either pay for a Disney+ subscription and increase the official view count, thereby increasing the project’s revenue and likelihood the folks working on it have their contracts renewed, or I can convince myself Disney is some evil corporation consisting of people who don’t deserve to be compensated for their efforts and pirate it. Back when I was a kid with no assets to my name piracy made some sense. However, now that I have the means to support creators, I do.

> Back when I was a kid with no assets to my name piracy made some sense. However, now that I have the means to support creators, I do.

This is the most sensible argument I've heard for being anti-piracy. It is a matter of means, and I've had a similar experience with my approach to piracy.

I'd be interested to know more statistics about what demographics perform piracy and on what kinds of media.

Not consuming media offered by a corrupt system would be plausible. And there would be plenty of choices to source content directly from artists. Or make your own.

Pirating content is just something people do because it's technically feasible. To silence the cognitive dissonance and justify the behavior towards their peers and reconcile it with the rest of their character (presumably they would not steal physical objects with a clear ownership status), this narrative of a morally motivated fight against the big bad recording company or film studio is employed. It's intellectually dishonest.

This is true AFAIK. Growing up in a lower economic class, I'd engage in piracy simply because modern computers make it trivial. At first it was for entertainment, but over time it exposed me to programming. Piracy ended up being a gateway to building my career, so I'm thankful for that much. Even if it's kind of ironic.

I have and will gladly pay money for authors/developers that really get me excited, though consuming so much interesting content for free can make me pretty jaded. To a pirate, paying for certain software might as well be giving a donation.

As someone who sees pirating as civil disobedience, I would like to respectfully disagree.

Disney (and friends) spend the GDP of a small country to ensure that my entire life is surrounded by their products and enshrined themselves in international treaties to ensure that it will remain so. I could stop consuming their media, which would require me to withdraw from 90% of all movies and music that my friends and family want to watch, which whether I like it or not is what I would call "my culture".

I don't think this is fair, specially considering that I had no say in this state of things and that changing it would require me to essentially mobilize my entire nation against the foreign interests of the USA.

I don't expect everyone to agree with this point of view, but to call it "intellectually dishonest" feels to me like an unnecessary agression. If anything, I would counterargue: expecting people to either pay a toll to access their culture or to to become "cultural monks" is what's truly wrong, especially when there's an alternative that literally favors the interests of people over corporations.

I am re-listening to Lessig's "Free Culture" this week while driving. My oh my how the younger generation has been conditioned to have no rights as consumers. Just pay perpetually and hope permission is granted, the licensing doesn't require yet another subscription and hope the servers don't go down b/c they're no longer profitable. When driving in silence it sounds just like my Yahoo Music library sounds these days.

this civil disobedience, is it just evening the score between you and Disney? Because that I would understand. What I'm criticising is the claim of piracy as some sort of moral fight of the oppressed. The noble filesharer uploading this year's Transformers instalment for the greater good. That's just giving it way more credit than it deserves.

I personally find more intellectually dishonest to compare piracy to theft.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I think it becomes FUD when the same message is not applied to other similar products.

Windows Media Player must also be used a incredible amount to watch pirated content, but it's not a label we put on it.

It comes down, to me, to the primary goal of the userbase. Primary goal of Kodi/XBMC/Plex/Emby users is generally piracy. Not true for WMP.

There is some line but it's unclear and I don't know exactly how to draw it

Are you sure most people who use wmp in 2021 aren't just using it to watch the downloaded movie/show/etc?

Serious question, because most people just do media in their browser or iTunes (or equivalent from various streaming services) at this point.

Is VLC a piracy tool? What about mpv?

I suspect you are deciding what a tool is for and then deciding the motivations of that tool's users based on what you decided the tool is for.

Compare: The vast majority of lockpick owners just think it's a fun skill. They never use the picks other than on locks that are explicitly purchased for picking (locks they or a friend own, usually not actually locking anything, etc). Yet when traveling to (e.g. defcon) places where they will be socially lockpicking with other enthusiasts, the TSA often harasses people for being theives. It's happened to me and plenty of others because folks decide the intent based on the tool.

Fine, I'll bite.

Any stats to back "the vast majority"? Isn't that to be expected of literally any media player software? You obviously need a number of non drm-crippled media to watch and you care about quality/features/availabilty:

https://xkcd.com/488/

There is no hard data, of course. But a quick look at Kodi communities, for instance “Addons4Kodi” on Reddit shows that the vast majority of the top posts are dedicated to piracy. And even dipping your toe into Kodi communities shows it pretty clearly.

> Isn't that to be expected of literally any media player software?

I guess how you define the term. Apple TV? No, I’d say the majority of users are watching copyrighted DRM streams. But it’s definitely media player software.

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.

Old: Usenet Then: Netflix/other streaming Now: Too many streaming services, back to old :-)

To some extent yep. The media companies overplayed their hand and made it too expensive or annoying to keep up with.

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.

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

It really doesn’t. There hasn’t been an active Android maintainer for ages at this point - it’s only just barely supported.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

[2] http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/drwho/

I would be happy to complete your Doctor Who collection. It's definitely worth watching all of it.

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.

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

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 ?

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.

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.

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

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.

I bought 3 OSMC Vero 4k boxes (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.

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

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)

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

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).

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.

For network video or audio streaming, I use NDI.

When I found it, it was quite a pleasant surprise.

Do you have more links on NDI? Is it free? I think Kodi would be interested in integrating!

Link: https://ndi.tv/tools/

AFAIK it is not free.

NDI captures the entire screen, so I open Kodi, and it captures both audio and video. There's no need to integrate it with Kodi, it just works.

Then it can be seen in other computers in the same network.

How does this compare to Plex?

Jellyfin is more like Plex. Kodi is more like Roku.

- 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.

Plex is actually a (significantly diverged) fork of Kodi (then called XBMC). They might not share any code at this point.

There was at least one complete rewrite since the OSXBMC devs days.

I'm pretty sure Plex is a complete rewrite that only shares the name of Plex with that fork, and well the inspiration of it as well .

Actually had some people that worked on XBMC go and start Plex, bad blood included.

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.

Plex is significantly more polished and pleasant to actually use, especially for normals. Kodi has more customizability if you like but it still feels rough around the edges.

> How does this compare to Plex?

Quite similar, but without all the invasive monitoring and telemetry. For example: you need an "account" to run plex on your local network.

Kind of sad none of the responses really answered the question in detail.

What I would like to know:

1. What features does Plex have that Kodi doesn't?

2. What features does Kodi have that Plex doesn't?

I get that at this point it is somewhat an apples/oranges comparison, but still: As a Plex/Kodi user, what am I not getting that the other provides?

I know Kodi has a lot of plugins, but I'd like to hear of specific examples of plugins and how people use them in a way that you can't with Plex.

Edit: One somewhat useful Reddit comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/mciv5l/kodi_vs_...

I really wanted to move to Kodi to be able to run everything locally (Plex requires a login etc) but it was way too much friction for my use case (and I don't think it is such a unique use case). I keep my media in separate folders for each genre and wanted to do a one-to-one mapping of folder to "library" so that I can just click on, say, "sci-fi" and see all the movies for that in a grid and so on. Plex makes this very easy and for Kodi, I had to do investigate all sorts of workarounds like creating "dynamic views" (or something similar I think) and even then it wasn't as smooth and easy as Plex. Also, some of the features require specific themes which is not a great design IMHO. Basically gave up and have continued with Plex - it seems to be the gold standard in the balance between polish and features (always happy to explore other options though).

Your experience echoes mine to a certain extent.

When searching for a media platform, I tried various ones including Kodi (and the various forks/environments like LibreElec et. al), Plex and others.

I also have a folder hierarchy which Kodi doesn't respect (very annoying) and played around with Plex as well.

However, I am unwilling to log in and share telemetry about my own personal library with Plex.

As such, I went with MythTV, which isn't as slick as Plex or Kodi, but does most of the job (that is, manage my local media library). It lacks in streaming options, including podcasts and the devs seem much more focused on the DVR than anything else.

That said, for what it does, MythTV is pretty good, but there's a lot it doesn't do.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I don't like Plex's telemetry aspects either and am pretty much focused on my own content (e.g. I don't really use Plex TV or other streaming bits). In addition to what I mentioned about my library organization needs, I just need to be able to view/search my content easily (Plex's default grid layout and sorting/filtering options are pretty well done in this regard e.g. being able to sort by Date Added/Release Date etc) and view them on my TV via using Chromecast (Plex's android client is far from perfect but gets the basic job done). If a solution covers these aspects well enough without having to share telemetry, I'll drop Plex in a heartbeat.

>If a solution covers these aspects well enough without having to share telemetry,

MythTV[0] does okay with video and music libraries.

It's available as packages on most distributions[1] which allows me to keep my front end and back ends synched just by performing regular package updates.

It is open source and can also be compiled from source[2] if you prefer it that way.

I run my back end on a VM with 4GB RAM and 2 vCPUs. My front end is a fanless miniPC[3] (I bought it almost three years ago, so I'm sure you can do better now for the same money) which renders 1080p/Stereo (I don't have a surround-sound system, but that's definitely supported) via HDMI pretty flawlessly. I imagine that a newer front end device could easily handle 4K (although I don't have a device to display that) resolution.

Edit: I'd add that the front end and back and can run on the same system, but the physical layout of my home made it more useful to split the two.

The Mythtv Wiki[4] is also pretty good for many set up/configuration issues.

It's not perfect by any measure, but it does the job without telemetry or external dependencies.

Core MythTV development seems pretty active, but the broader "ecosystem" (plugins, addons, etc.) is very weak.

[0] https://www.mythtv.org/

[1] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Packages#Targeted_Linux_Distribu...

[2] https://www.mythtv.org/download

[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NXPSCK9

[4] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Main_Page

Edit: Fixed front end/back end. Added the missing link.

Kodi allows you to regex your way to any folder hierarchy: https://kodi.wiki/view/Scrapers

Not to be an ass but why not store your films in a flat layout (one folder per film) then use the built in features like "movies > by genre > sci-fi"?

Because metadata doesn’t exist. There is the directory (NOT a folder). There is the movie file. End of report.

Because of a limited world view. Movies are ONLY one thing. SciFi OR Comedy. Not both. Never both.

Because the idea behind a genre-based movie directory hierarchy is _genius_, and the tens of thousands of people that don’t fight the practical organization methods of media catalogs are sheep.

Kodi is for power users, Plex is for anyone who just wants a place to host their media collection.

You can mix-and-match too! Plex puts out an official Kodi plugin: https://github.com/plexinc/plex-for-kodi .

Unfortunately Plex stopped caring it years ago..

Does anyone know if Kodi offers streaming media over local network or internet similar to Plex?

don't quote me on this but i think kodi/xbmc started back before smartphones weren't really a thing. people mostly had 1 desktop computer and they would watch movies on their monitor or with the computer plugged into the TV.

plex was made later on when having multiple devices (desktop, laptop, phone, tablet etc) was a bit more common, so now instead of having all your media stuck on one device you instead run it on a server and connect to that server using an app on each device.

so that's the fundamental difference between them anyway. one is mainly design to be used on 1 devices while the other is design to be used on many

Plex focuses on having a server component that transcodes and their “Plex Pass” service for better connectivity, enabling lightweight native players for all of your devices. This way you can watch any of your content on anything even over cellular, even if it’s a weird format that the device wouldn’t easily support.

This is a departure from the traditional XBMC-on-device that also acts as the client trying to play any format of content.

Kodi is amazing and I’d use it if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t want a new interface, I simply want my “owned” content to show up as Yet Another App on my stream boxes and phones. Plex fits that bill.

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).

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.

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?

Rip your own Blu-rays.

people used to buy CD/DVD/BR and rip them. nowadays it's easier and faster to download from somewhere.

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

Spend $30 on vastly overpriced Blu-Ray discs to get the "digital edition"

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

Pretty sure the time consuming but of that is the metadata lookups going to the internet.

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.

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.

SFTP add-on [1] has been faster and more reliable in my experience

1. https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:SFTP_support

Plex does the same, yet it take a few seconds to do that on the same library.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

To continue a theme here, Boxee's software originated as a fork of XBMC.

Kodi is fantastic. Nothing really comes close to how good it is.

Definitely not for your grandma though.

First rule of fight club...

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

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

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

Anyone use this to replace a car DVD player?

Stremio is way better.

Why?

> Stremio is way better.

In what way?

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

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.

> 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...

So no.

By the same logic, uTorrent was what got the TPB founders in trouble.

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.

Omi was running an IPTV service, nothing to do with Kodi.

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