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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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/

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