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Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

kodi.tv

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Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#251

Post by thanatos519 »

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 don't even use a GUI. I use mpv with a wireless keyboard. There have been weird multichannel codec passthrough issues no matter what player I am using, like ... if the 5.1 signal says 'side left' then nothing comes out of my 5.1 system 'rear left'. WTF... but once they are fixed, they are fixed forever in a profile.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#252

Post by sebow »

If you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty, kodi is powerful and must-have software for consuming media in your home. However for the average user i might think it's a little bit overwhelming, of course this mainly depends on the wanted use.Plex might be suitable for most in that regard, emby used to be aswell though somehow they managed to fall a lot imo.

Good companion apps for kodi are KDE-Connect, bubbleupnp, UMS Server.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#253

Post by MisterTea »

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 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.

This 100%. Mini PC's are cheap and hook to TVs just as easily.

Years back A friend who lived int he country side wanted to watch a specific Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. I had it on my server at home and I also happened to have my Linux laptop with me. So I plug my laptop into the TV, sshfs mounted my servers video directory and played it using VLC on his big screen. Took maybe 5 minutes to setup and he was thoroughly impressed that I have "my own streaming service".

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#254

Post by magoon »

thesausageking wrote: post #19

How does this compare to Plex?

Plex focuses on having a server component that transcodes and their “Plex Pass” service for better connectivity, enabling lightweight native players for all of your devices. This way you can watch any of your content on anything even over cellular, even if it’s a weird format that the device wouldn’t easily support.

This is a departure from the traditional XBMC-on-device that also acts as the client trying to play any format of content.

Kodi is amazing and I’d use it if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t want a new interface, I simply want my “owned” content to show up as Yet Another App on my stream boxes and phones. Plex fits that bill.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#255

Post by kiririn »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #239

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 D…

If you want full skin customisation (including menus/layouts) via GUI, Amber is a good choice. It is the most customisable skin, and one of about 2-3 skins that seems like a UI designer has had a hand in it

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#256

Post by wiether »

crispyambulance wrote: post #210
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 found Plex to be decently capable for all the things I want EXCEPT ONE. For whatever bizarre reason, Plex all but requires you conform to specific filename formats. I don't why, but this pisses me off to no end. What's the point of having elaborate media containers like MKV if you can't just point to an arbitrarily named file, process, fill-in, or read the metadata and have it added to your library? I mean, Plex…

> For whatever bizarre reason, Plex all but requires you conform to specific filename formats. I don't why, but this pisses me off to no end.

Idk, on Kodi I had to rename my files a certain way for them to be associated with metadata from IMDB & all, so I was used to having Filebot[1] doing the job for me. When I switched to Plex, I didn't even think about it, I kept renaming my files with Filebot. Also I prefer the light and clearer pattern that is resulting from Filebot instead of having weird filenames depending on the release.

[1] : https://www.filebot.net/

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#257

Post by KoftaBob »

chrisjc wrote: post #245
KoftaBob wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://firecore.com/infuse

Very nice! Never heard of this but gave it a go and it looks promising. I'm already using VLC and accessing content via local network, but this looks a lot more polished and always good to have a backup/alternative.

My favorite feature is the ability to stream media from OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox etc. I just throw my movies/shows in my OneDrive and stream it from Infuse, saving the space on my laptop!

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#258

Post by fbanon »

deadbunny wrote: post #229
fbanon wrote: post #196

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...

Pretty sure the time consuming but of that is the metadata lookups going to the internet.

Nope, I've turned off online metadata. I've debugged it and the issue is that Kodi wouldn't pipeline the SMB read requests, so a huge chunk of time is spent waiting for small bits of data to arrive.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#259

Post by wiether »

deadbunny wrote: post #229
fbanon wrote: post #196

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...

Pretty sure the time consuming but of that is the metadata lookups going to the internet.

Plex does the same, yet it take a few seconds to do that on the same library.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#260

Post by apexalpha »

crispyambulance wrote: post #210
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 found Plex to be decently capable for all the things I want EXCEPT ONE. For whatever bizarre reason, Plex all but requires you conform to specific filename formats. I don't why, but this pisses me off to no end. What's the point of having elaborate media containers like MKV if you can't just point to an arbitrarily named file, process, fill-in, or read the metadata and have it added to your library? I mean, Plex…

The answer is simple: not every media file is an MKV that has metadata inside it.

Your solution works for MKV files. The Plex solution works for all file types and containers.

It's easy to see why Plex would prefer this way.

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