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Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

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Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#211

Post by pmoleri »

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…

Using Kodi in my tv box and setup SMB to a shared folder on my Windows laptop. It was an easy setup and pretty frictionless later. I usually still use VLC to get the subtitles upfront saved with the same filename as the video file. Whatever I get in my laptop I can see in the TV later. Chromecast is also an option, not sure if there's some quality loss in that case.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#212

Post by rmrfchik »

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…

Totally agree. All I want is "here my files, let me pick one". And KODI make me to choose genres, directors, stars, movie length, all this stuff. Need to do many clicks just to browse directory/dlna. And it's laggy.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#213

Post by sam_lowry_ »

AndrewDavis wrote: post #180
thefz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The thing that bothers me the most is that file browser is behind 4..5 clicks while it should be there as first-class menu.

Also, file lists order folders and files independently.

If not for those two things, Kodi would be perfect.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#214

Post by tunap »

probably_wrong wrote: post #137
puchatek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not consuming media offered by a corrupt system would be plausible. And there would be plenty of choices to source content directly from artists. Or make your own. Pirating content is just something people do because it's technically feasible. To silence the cognitive dissonance and justify the behavior towards their peers and reconcile it with the rest of their character (presumably they would not steal physical obj…

As someone who sees pirating as civil disobedience, I would like to respectfully disagree. Disney (and friends) spend the GDP of a small country to ensure that my entire life is surrounded by their products and enshrined themselves in international treaties to ensure that it will remain so. I could stop consuming their media, which would require me to withdraw from 90% of all movies and music that my friends and fami…

I am re-listening to Lessig's "Free Culture" this week while driving. My oh my how the younger generation has been conditioned to have no rights as consumers. Just pay perpetually and hope permission is granted, the licensing doesn't require yet another subscription and hope the servers don't go down b/c they're no longer profitable. When driving in silence it sounds just like my Yahoo Music library sounds these days.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#215

Post by nyepepper »

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…

My requirements towards one solution is almost the same as yours. I've tried for a (relative) long time with jellyfin since I don't like the half-assed selfhosted/commercial approach from plex. I think jellyfin works great for:

* multi-user with setting limits and access * multiple devices * chromecasting everything * native apps (the one for firetv works perfect) * meta data scrapping * automatic subtitle downloading and managing * creating playlists and collections

I tried using jellyfin also for: * music * audiobooks * ebooks but without any satisfactory success. I now use calibre-online for ebooks and am yet to find something good for audiobooks/music.

I don't think you will ever find a PERFECT selfhosted completely opensource tool for everything and by now i think that's fine.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#216

Post by blendergeek »

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…

> 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

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#217

Post by tunap »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #44

The real OGs had this running on a modded original Xbox when it was still xbmc. In order to watch MST3K episodes from emule. Running CoreELEC on an odroid N2+ now, highly recommended.

The OGs were using Hauppage WinTV & ATI AIWs long before Xbox was released.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#219

Post by kevincox »

Dedime wrote: post #99
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…

As far as Jellyfin goes in my own experience: - Supports phone / tablet / browser / roku / others - Can chromecast - Supports movies, tv. Not sure about random videos but I suppose you could do it. - Supports subtitle downloading - Haven't used it myself, but supports podcasts, books, photos, music Also FOSS. Doesn't have the same motive as commercial software ala Plex to nag you, and it hasn't nagged me yet.

I use jellyfin myself but it is so incredibly slow that often it is basically non-functional. It seems that usually when I first open it after a while it is fast enough but then it rapidly slows to a crawl where it sometimes can't even start the next episode in a series. I'm not running it on fantastic hardware but it should me more than sufficient for this task, other services on the box are snappy. I would happily replace it if I could find an alternative.

The developers also have no concept of security past the very basics. Make sure you run it in a network namrspace or something otherwise it will accidently bind to random network interfaces even though you told it to use the loopback address. The devs don't seem to think this is a problem. Falling back to a public interface is a feature that prevents support requests.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#220

Post by 3np »

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…

Nothing wrong with that, whatever works for you!

I did have similar experiences with Kodi in the past. What I realized is that many plugins are of really poor quality and can mess up Kodi in very unexpected ways - the way issues manifest may not hint at a plugin being at fault. No sandboxing and a bunch of dubious Python modules. And that's besides all the possible security issues.

Nowadays I just have a basic skin + JellyConn and it's been very solid and smooth.

The Kodi plugin ecosystem is really alluring with all the possible features but it's a can of worms. Kodi itself is quite stable and predictable otherwise, in my experience.

EDIT: Oh, and I don't have much to say about Kodi media library organization - it seems a bit finicky so I'd do that either manually like you're already doing or with some other software more suited for it (Sonarr+Radarr/Jellyfin/any other good recommendations?)

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