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

151–160 of 349 posts

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#151

Post by labster »

tuscen wrote: post #136
stjohnswarts wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#152

Post by ekianjo »

mackrevinack wrote: post #132
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…

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 lay…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#153

Post by shmerl »

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…

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

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#154

Post by croon »

Keyframe wrote: post #148
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 fe…

> 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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#155

Post by krelian »

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…

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/

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#156

Post by harrisi »

otherme123 wrote: post #108
harrisi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#157

Post by Groxx »

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…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#158

Post by Keyframe »

croon wrote: post #154
Keyframe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

> 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…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#159

Post by tclover »

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…

Same, just using PotPlayer & Foobar2000

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#160

Post by jessikat »

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…

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 >_<
Post reply on HN