Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

kodi.tv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 349 posts

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#141

Post by ekianjo »

progman32 wrote: post #93

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…

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

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#142

Post by raffraffraff »

bane wrote: post #77

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 scrap…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#143

Post by benjaminwootton »

smackeyacky wrote: post #139
bane wrote: post #77

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 scrap…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#144

Post by patrickk »

bane wrote: post #85
a254613e wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.

Why?

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#145

Post by azalemeth »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #23

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.

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#146

Post by KoftaBob »

bane wrote: post #77

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 scrap…

https://firecore.com/infuse

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#147

Post by noisy_boy »

nobody9999 wrote: post #116
noisy_boy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#148

Post by Keyframe »

progman32 wrote: post #93

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…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#149

Post by apexalpha »

bane wrote: post #77

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 scrap…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#150

Post by patrickk »

bung wrote: post #102

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.
Post reply on HN