Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System • Hacker News Board

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#341

Post by pabs3 » Wed, Dec 22, 2021, 11:58 PM UTC

keithah wrote: post #329

pabs3 wrote: post #324

Maybe after the Software Freedom Conservancy lawsuit is won, Kodi will be able to run on Vizio TVs. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

The problem is the toolkit offered, more than anything else. Kodi needs lots of native code hooks into the OS, which Tizen, WebOSTV, etc don't support, or at least don't give access freely. Otherwise Kodi could be on every platform.. Most TV OS's that aren't Android TV or Roku require you to write web-based apps (unless you're Netflix or YouTube, but another story there) which abstract all the 'good stuff' out, so im…

I was suggesting that instead of the pre-installed OS on Vizio TVs (which is Linux and systemd based according to the lawsuit), you could install your own OS and then run Kodi on top of that. Since Kodi already supports running on Linux, it should not be hard to do this setup once the lawsuit concludes and the code has been released and the installation procedure documented. So the platform offered by the TV doesn't matter, because you'll replace it with a normal Linux one and run whatever you want on top.

For the problem of running Kodi on the web and web-ish platforms, maybe WASM is the future? There is also emscripten for converting languages normally compiled to binaries to JavaScript.

For Brightscript, maybe a similar approach to emscripten would work, transpiling from other languages to Brightscript, possibly via JavaScript. Or I guess a second app based on Brightscript.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#342

Post by vaviloff » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 4:05 AM UTC

Wow, so much praise for Kodi, and it's well-deserved.

Been using LibreELEC (which is basically a Kodi OS) on just a RPi3 for a few years now, it's a good enough client for non-smart TV to simply browse stuff from NAS with Yatse on Android. In a bare minimum case not too difficult to set up, just add a source via SFTP and you're done, no need for scanning.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#343

Post by kasabali » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 12:51 AM UTC

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.

SFTP add-on [1] has been faster and more reliable in my experience

1. https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:SFTP_support

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#344

Post by rograndom » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 12:21 AM UTC

croon wrote: post #154

Keyframe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I've been using Kodi since first release on original xbox, when it was XBMC. It wouldn't be HN if I didn't correct you in that it was originally XBMP on the old Xbox, before it graduated to a media center. It was a revelation in that the UI was amazing for the time, and the hardware was good enough to decode everything available. I remember soldering in an extra IR eye so that I could power on and off the Xbox with…

> It was a revelation in that the UI was amazing for the time, and the hardware was good enough to decode everything available.

Almost. I had a set of ffmpeg scripts that would encode blu-rays at 720p just so so it would playback without any dropped frames. But yeah, everything else was fantastic.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#345

Post by pksebben » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 4:59 AM UTC

hansel_der wrote: post #262

chrisjc wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

waiting for a response about how you can then also transcode the video into ascii by piping in an extra command :)

no extra command but happy to ablidge: 'mplayer -vo caca'

I recently went on a dive into libcaca. Those devs are the heroes we need.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#346

Post by puchatek » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

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…

this civil disobedience, is it just evening the score between you and Disney? Because that I would understand. What I'm criticising is the claim of piracy as some sort of moral fight of the oppressed. The noble filesharer uploading this year's Transformers instalment for the greater good. That's just giving it way more credit than it deserves.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#347

Post by Shorel » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

keithah wrote: post #334

Shorel wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For network video or audio streaming, I use NDI. When I found it, it was quite a pleasant surprise.

Do you have more links on NDI? Is it free? I think Kodi would be interested in integrating!

Link: https://ndi.tv/tools/

AFAIK it is not free.

NDI captures the entire screen, so I open Kodi, and it captures both audio and video. There's no need to integrate it with Kodi, it just works.

Then it can be seen in other computers in the same network.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#348

Post by scubbo » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 8:45 PM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #313

scubbo wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You're missing it entirely. They want "just a screen" precisely so that they can use whatever they want on it, including filemanagers if they wish. Moreover, they correctly understand what the TV industry works so hard to obscure. It's computers all the way down. If you're gonna slap a computer on my screen, then let me use it as a general purpose computer. If, however, you insist on putting a computer on my screen t…

I'm not sure how we're managing to agree so much on overall direction/motivation, while seeming to contradict one another.

> They want "just a screen" precisely so that they can use whatever they want on it, including filemanagers if they wish.

Yep - and if the screen is "just a screen" (i.e. has no file manager or other media-interfacing functionality on it), there there will need to be some _other_ computer in the stack of "computers all the way down" to provide the media-interface. For me, Kodi does that job perfectly well, but it doesn't work well for everyone.

> the low cost of the TV is subsidized by the data they sell to others gained by spying on you.

Yes, this is an uncontroversial statement of a distasteful truth.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#349

Post by JetSpiegel » Mon, Dec 27, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

Kodi already has a (passable) web interface, so it's possible to expose that externally and get on-premises Spotify and Netflix on the same interface.

The main problem is that the remote control and the remote viewing interfaces are co-mingled, it's not very usable. There are alternative interfaces, but they are crappier.