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Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

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Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#191

Post by bestouff »

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

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#192

Post by habeebtc »

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…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#193

Post by tinus_hn »

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

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#196

Post by fbanon »

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...

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#197

Post by globular-toast »

bestouff wrote: post #191

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…

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).

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#198

Post by globular-toast »

mkdirp wrote: post #185

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 o…

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#199

Post by globular-toast »

Deukhoofd wrote: post #177
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.

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#200

Post by blentrop »

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

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