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Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

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Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#231

Post by dsr_ »

rcoilliot wrote: post #114
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…

The issue with Kodi is, in my opinion, the same as with setting up a mame cab for playing roms : Perpetual Work In Progress. Users are spending way more time configuring, optimizing, and eventually breaking the whole thing than actually enjoying it. On my side, i'm playing my content with my AppleTV through a Plex server on a Nas, using wired network, and I couldn't be happier. Using a professionnal, closed, solution…

One path is to sit back and enjoy the music.

Another path is to go in search of a better way to enjoy the music.

Both have their value, but if you start down the path of looking for the better way, don't lose track of the original goal. Too many audiophiles are still listening to their equipment instead of the music.

(Same goes for people playing vintage video games, watching movies, writing things by hand with fountain pens, supporting sports teams... this is a core part of modern civilization, I think.)

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#232

Post by kuschku »

thefz wrote: post #163
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…

> 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 I've stopped using it at home because it keeps on wanting to transcode files for me even if I configured it not to and having gigabit ethernet. And it destroys my server's CPU doing so since I'm not that rich to have a spare video card around.

That's because you put files in that are in formats no browser can play. Next time, try obtaining h264+AAC in mp4 container instead.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#233

Post by chrisjc »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #143
smackeyacky wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As @lajamerr tries to clear up, "chromecast" has now fallen victim to google's incredulous renaming/rebranding tradition.

Chromecast is now either the action you take to "beam" from your handheld device to a TV or an AndroidTV/GoogleTV/Chromecast hybrid device.

Just went to the google store to find a link for you and had some trouble finding what I'm talking about and apparently chromecast devices are now considered part of the Nest family complicating things even more.

https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv_com...

Edit: I stand somewhat corrected... there still is a chromecast device that comes without AndroidTV. I guess this just further illustrates my point about how bad/confusing google's naming and branding strategy is.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#234

Post by kuschku »

schemathings wrote: post #14
StockHuman wrote: post #9

For your consideration, Jellyfin. [0] [0] https://jellyfin.org/

Interesting - I bought Emby this year for serving local media - my one gripe is no thumbnails/preview when you scrub over the timeline - this one has it. Will give it a spin.

There's actually ongoing work on extremely efficient tooling for thumbnails/previews :)

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#235

Post by rhipitr »

Is there not a getting started section on this page? After skimming the linked page and comments here, it seems to be very configurable in how it runs, but besides a community forum, is there just a general setup guide for a basic use case somewhere?

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#236

Post by deadbunny »

noisy_boy wrote: post #76
BeetleB wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of sad none of the responses really answered the question in detail. What I would like to know: 1. What features does Plex have that Kodi doesn't? 2. What features does Kodi have that Plex doesn't? I get that at this point it is somewhat an apples/oranges comparison, but still: As a Plex/Kodi user, what am I not getting that the other provides? I know Kodi has a lot of plugins, but I'd like to hear of specific e…

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…

Not to be an ass but why not store your films in a flat layout (one folder per film) then use the built in features like "movies > by genre > sci-fi"?

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#237

Post by folex »

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…

Yes, it's a struggle. I fell-back to just using TV's browser for watching almost anything.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#238

Post by nyepepper »

refracture wrote: post #118
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…

Auto subtitle downloads? Come now if you are only watching rips of your own legally purchased media the subs would be available to you already… unless you aren’t. Seriously though you are asking a lot here.

this already exists in jellyfin

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#239

Post by mattowen_uk »

My Kodi set-up is a few-years-old copy of LibreELEC[1] set to NOT auto update. I've barely configured it beyond giving the SMB paths to my video collection. I ignore all the meta-data rubbish it wants to add, and just browse to what I want to watch via the text-based list that's built into the default skin. It's all running on a Raspberry Pi 3b hooked into my big home theatre rig.

Granted, 90% of my Kodi viewing is Dr Who episodes[2] so I'm probably not the target market for it, but as long as you don't fiddle with it, it works just fine.

What I WOULD like is a new skin that strips everything out of the UI except my video library. I have absolutely no use for the music section, the photos(who seriously uses that?!) or the weather. I've briefly looked into the XML that is used for Kodi skinning, but life is too short for me even to want to go there.

---

[1] https://libreelec.tv/

[2] http://www.jaruzel.com/apps/drwho/

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#240

Post by scubbo »

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 does sound like you've had slightly-more-than-average bad luck (I had some similar problems occasionally when I had Kodi on an RPi3, but it's been flawless for a year or so after I upgraded to RPi4), but you're certainly not wrong!

One point to consider, though, is that most TVs don't have built-in file managers (or, indeed, NAS-connection capability) - for folks who prefer to watch their media on a big screen, you need some client that can a) connect to your storage location, and b) play it out over HDMI etc. For me, Kodi is the best-functioning of those options.

If you're content with watching on a laptop/PC screen (or if your PC has your TV as an AV-out), however, then you're golden and there's nothing that Kodi really does over-and-above to make it worthwhile.

EDIT: Ah, I see[1] you do indeed have a PC connected to your TV. In which case - yeah, there's no reason not to do what you're doing!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634830

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