51–60 of 95 posts
Showtime/Movian was my TV media player for years, actually worked pretty great until I got a Shield. Cool to see it is still being developed, like XBMC.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”. I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it. Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI…
Part of the reason more people now understand how to use jellyfin etc is because they have been used to doing it with netflix and other apps etc for 10+ years
Kodi's got some really weird UI choices going on. I don't think it's the case that Netflix-alike UIs are anywhere near equivalently bad, but people are able to use them anyway just due to familiarity. I think Kodi's is simply a lot worse.
Even the parts of Jellyfin that don't resemble Netflix (as there's no user-facing equivalent in Netflix)—the server & library management portions—I find vastly easier to use than Kodi's equivalents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.
If my memory is not faulty it was even able to stream movies from multi volume rar files over SAMBA which felt like magic. IYKYK
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”. I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it. Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI…
I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content. 1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do some…
It comes with a dedicated remote (though it does support CEC), which solves #1, at the cost of having an extra remote.
I mainly hit #2 when scrubbing, often (worse on some compression types than others), it'll just freeze frame for a minute before everything catches up. This may be because I'm serving the content via HTTP to the Vera V, I've been meaning to try NFS and/or SMB. Never had issues with playback itself, probably because the Vera V hardware and the OSMC/Kodi build are co-developed, so there is pretty much always hardware decode support.
#3 surprised me; Kodi supporting just using my directory layout is why I use it over something like Jellyfin! I just added the HTTP share, and then navigate Videos->files->my_http_share_name and I'm in my directory structure.
> Despite the constraints of the Xbox’s single-threaded 733MHz CPU, XBMC 4.0 includes improvements to task scheduling that allow multiple activities to run concurrently.
As if the Pentium 3 wasn’t regularly used to run fully multi-tasking operating systems for years.
My old 400mhz P2 was able to play videos, catalog my music collection, download files, and let me edit code simultaneously just fine.
XBMC on the original Xbox was so unbelievably far ahead of it's time, it's crazy and that's not just nostalgia talking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”. I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it. Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI…
I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content. 1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do some…
And it is nice, I guess -- it's functionally simple to just play files over an SMB share. But the interface is... well, the interface was really amazing on the OG Xbox and that was a very long time ago.
So even though I keep Kodi around, most of my video-watching is with Plex, wherein: The library updates itself. The subtitles download themselves (the subtitles even theoretically sync themselves to the video). Stuff generally Just Works, even over the WAN.
Plex is very set-and-forget, and its performance is great on a ~$20 ONN streamer-box from Wal-Mart (and there's also smart TV apps and PC-oriented playback, of course).
The user experience is really good: The interface is very remote-centric and flows well while kicked back in an easy chair in front of a TV. My eldery, tech-averse dad uses Plex without any trouble, which he'd absolutely never be able to do with Kodi.
Amusingly, Plex is/was a fork XBMC. :)
Despite the complexities of its client-server model (where both sides are kind of fat), and the expense, I can't recommend Plex highly enough.
That said: Jellyfin is free both as in beer and as in libre. It also gets most of this stuff right, and from what I've read it's been improving steadily for a number of years. I'd have written about Jellyfin instead, but I don't have as much direct experience with it (and I paid for Plex a long time ago).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”. I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it. Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI…
I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content. 1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do some…
2. Are you running Kodi on a potato?
3. You can absolutely use Kodi without a media database.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be lovely if there is a backported version of the Project Mayhem 3 HD skin. I remember using a backported version for Kodi on my Linux box many years ago, however I doubt it is still maintained!
I have the source code to an old version of XBMC sitting round somewhere, including the Project Mayhem skin in non-XBOX-specific file formats if you're interested.
Gotta love this: > Despite the constraints of the Xbox’s single-threaded 733MHz CPU, XBMC 4.0 includes improvements to task scheduling that allow multiple activities to run concurrently. As if the Pentium 3 wasn’t regularly used to run fully multi-tasking operating systems for years. My old 400mhz P2 was able to play videos, catalog my music collection, download files, and let me edit code simultaneously just fine.
Maybe XBMC's kernel wasn't designed for multitasking and they're now adding better support. I could understand wanting to throw the whole CPU at whatever the user was doing, especially in early days.