Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System • Hacker News Board

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#171

Post by cheeze » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:20 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #88

afavour wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#172

Post by erdewit » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#173

Post by gadders » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:23 AM UTC

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#174

Post by npigrounet » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

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…

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

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#175

Post by 0x0nyandesu » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

erdewit wrote: post #172

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…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#176

Post by marcus_cemes » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:32 AM UTC

erdewit wrote: post #172

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…

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.

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/

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#177

Post by Deukhoofd » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

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.

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#178

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

npigrounet wrote: post #174

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…

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

[deleted]

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#179

Post by asah » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

nonbirithm wrote: post #100

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…

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 fil…

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

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#180

Post by AndrewDavis » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

thefz wrote: post #161

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…

> 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…

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.