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Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

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Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#301

Post by bacchusracine »

oefnak wrote: post #97
harrisi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcasm? I don't mean any disrespect or negativity, I just don't understand. I'm not familiar with this space, but I don't see why the aforementioned expectations are unrealistic. The only issue I can imagine is big media companies strong arming a player in this space (which I assume is what happens to existing companies mentioned). There's nothing technically impossible mentioned.

Ebooks, photos and emulators? In my opinion they don't belong in my cinema app.

Technically photos and emulators have been a part of the whole for quite some time now already. The media center is evolving and games are a part of what people have begun to expect to be able to access as part of their ten foot interface. eBooks? Now that is where I too question things.

I don't know the use case where being able to read eBooks from the television is desirable. It certainly doesn't meet my definition of shared entertainment, which is something that media centers are intended for. They're media, yes, and they can be organized, sure--but is there a common use case for reading from the large screen? Unless one is disabled, I really don't see one.

However if looking for a better merge of Kodi and gameplaying I cannot recommend Batocera enough. It has a large retrocomputing (emulation) capability and also supports many DOS games and Windows games via dosbox or wine and has recently added Steam integration. On the media side of things it can be configured to automatically load kodi and seamlessly transition from Kodi to the Emulation Station frontend.

There will be some configuration but once configured it has in my experience generally stayed configured well and can be a set and forget type of appliance if you take the time to organize your games and media and then leave it alone after scraping. Also it's been one of the easiest configurations I've done in a long time. I encourage everyone to look into it.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#302

Post by addingnumbers »

crispyambulance wrote: post #294
apexalpha wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but Plex, I believe, also maintains it's own database for the media files. Why can't I just "tell it" the metadata in those cases and leave the filenames as is?

Why don't you?

It has an edit button in the UI for entering in the metadata to its database manually.

It has the option to prefer metadata already stored locally inside the container when populating its database.

It has the "match" button for interactively discovering and retrieving the metadata from an agent like IMDb or tvdb regardless of filename.

By default it tries to spare you having to do any of these things, but they put a lot of work into facilitating several alternatives when you'd rather do the work yourself.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#303

Post by scubbo »

jrm4 wrote: post #269
scubbo wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, yo…

"Most TV's don't have built-in file managers" Lack of a built in file manager on any device is an excellent indicator of "how bad the manufacturer is trying to reduce your freedom."

True, but irrelevant to the conversation at hand. And also ironic, given that most HNers decry smart TVs and yearn for a return to "just a screen", without apps (including file managers).

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#304

Post by scubbo »

lugorrr wrote: post #267
scubbo wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, yo…

May i ask what flavour of kodi you're using with your RPi4? OpenELEC, LibreELEC?

LibreELEC, off the top of my head - though (ironically, given the conversation being about the constant need for tinkering and fixing in solutions that should be robust) I'm away from my home right now, and my VPN is down so I can't ssh in to check :P

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#305

Post by bitexploder »

thejosh wrote: post #66
bitexploder wrote: post #59

We have a Linux server with Samba. Kodi connects to it beautifully. Even my kids can use it fine. Combine with VM that runs a VPN and deluge for optimal fun. Add a few simple IPTables rules to prevent traffic from leaking except over your VPN to calm down annoying Torrent monitors that your ISP might use. Been working for years. We vastly prefer to pay for content, but we ancient DVD rips and such that are not amenab…

Old: Usenet Then: Netflix/other streaming Now: Too many streaming services, back to old :-)

To some extent yep. The media companies overplayed their hand and made it too expensive or annoying to keep up with.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#306

Post by razze »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #111
eco wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plex is actually a (significantly diverged) fork of Kodi (then called XBMC). They might not share any code at this point.

I'm pretty sure Plex is a complete rewrite that only shares the name of Plex with that fork, and well the inspiration of it as well .

Actually had some people that worked on XBMC go and start Plex, bad blood included.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#307

Post by razze »

fbanon wrote: post #258
deadbunny wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you create an issue for this?

My last info was, that we don't process anything in parallel, as the old xml scrapers were not optimized for that. As we're moving to python scrapers now, we should be able to optimize the interface to handle more in parallel. That was the plan at least, but XML scrapers first need to be removed, as they hold back the API.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#308

Post by salfter »

pjc50 wrote: post #278
scubbo wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, yo…

Many TVs have DLNA, which you could use to play content off a NAS - if it ever worked properly. It's such an unloved standard.

One of mine does, but it only handles MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio...kinda useless when your videos are all H.264 with a variety of audio codecs.

Maybe newer TVs (this one's 10 years old) have support for more codecs, but I'm not inclined to replace it when it otherwise continues to work well. I'll just drive it with a Raspberry Pi running Kodi and call it good.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#309

Post by crispyambulance »

addingnumbers wrote: post #302
crispyambulance wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but Plex, I believe, also maintains it's own database for the media files. Why can't I just "tell it" the metadata in those cases and leave the filenames as is?

Why don't you? It has an edit button in the UI for entering in the metadata to its database manually. It has the option to prefer metadata already stored locally inside the container when populating its database. It has the "match" button for interactively discovering and retrieving the metadata from an agent like IMDb or tvdb regardless of filename. By default it tries to spare you having to do any of these things,…

In my own use case, I rip blurays, and these don't have the metadata populated. Files won't even appear in the UI if the filename isn't right, or it guesses completely wrongly based on just the filename. There is tucked away, really deep, some options for "unmatched" files. I had moved on to using filebot before trying that.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#310

Post by nobody9999 »

noisy_boy wrote: post #147
nobody9999 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience echoes mine to a certain extent. When searching for a media platform, I tried various ones including Kodi (and the various forks/environments like LibreElec et. al), Plex and others. I also have a folder hierarchy which Kodi doesn't respect (very annoying) and played around with Plex as well. However, I am unwilling to log in and share telemetry about my own personal library with Plex. As such, I went…

Thanks for sharing your experience. I don't like Plex's telemetry aspects either and am pretty much focused on my own content (e.g. I don't really use Plex TV or other streaming bits). In addition to what I mentioned about my library organization needs, I just need to be able to view/search my content easily (Plex's default grid layout and sorting/filtering options are pretty well done in this regard e.g. being able…

>If a solution covers these aspects well enough without having to share telemetry,

MythTV[0] does okay with video and music libraries.

It's available as packages on most distributions[1] which allows me to keep my front end and back ends synched just by performing regular package updates.

It is open source and can also be compiled from source[2] if you prefer it that way.

I run my back end on a VM with 4GB RAM and 2 vCPUs. My front end is a fanless miniPC[3] (I bought it almost three years ago, so I'm sure you can do better now for the same money) which renders 1080p/Stereo (I don't have a surround-sound system, but that's definitely supported) via HDMI pretty flawlessly. I imagine that a newer front end device could easily handle 4K (although I don't have a device to display that) resolution.

Edit: I'd add that the front end and back and can run on the same system, but the physical layout of my home made it more useful to split the two.

The Mythtv Wiki[4] is also pretty good for many set up/configuration issues.

It's not perfect by any measure, but it does the job without telemetry or external dependencies.

Core MythTV development seems pretty active, but the broader "ecosystem" (plugins, addons, etc.) is very weak.

[0] https://www.mythtv.org/

[1] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Packages#Targeted_Linux_Distribu...

[2] https://www.mythtv.org/download

[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NXPSCK9

[4] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Main_Page

Edit: Fixed front end/back end. Added the missing link.

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