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Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

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Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#72
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want an essay, we can agree to a rate and I can write it after you send me the check.

If you want people to "disarm an immoral system", you're not going to get far if you want to be paid to convince them. "One should not use X!" "Why?" "Pay me and I'll explain!"

I don't want to convince them of anything.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#73

How does this compare to Plex?

Jellyfin is more like Plex. Kodi is more like Roku.

- Plex is a closed source fork-and-re-write of an MacOS XBMC port that was codenamed OSXBMC.

- Jellyfin is a fork of Emby at the version before it went closed source.

- Emby was an open-source re-implementation of Plex.

- Genealogy is weird.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#74
post #3

Longtime Kodi user here. Bought an M1 MacBook Air in the spring and Kodi barely works. Video won't display even though the sound works fine, and instead the mouse will multiply thousands of time. You can move the mouse around and just leave trails of mouse cursors everywhere. It's like one out of every four times it will work as expected, but requires quitting and re-opening it over and over.

M1 is still new tech that is hit and miss with anything not from the walled garden. There's not enough interest to fix/develop for it.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#75
post #42

Been using Kodi (XBMC) for nearly 20 years. The piracy FUD surrounding XBMC a few years ago really disappointed me. We use Kodi for streaming tv (Australia) and internet radio and it is perfect for this. That's all I wanted to say really. The piracy FUD has been disappointing.

It’s not really FUD in the vast majority of cases, though. Kodi is used to play pirated content the vast majority of the time. No value judgment either way by me but it’s obviously true. Same with Plex.

This is like saying cars are used to escape from bank robberies or people walk out their front doors to commit crimes.

Just insane, sorry.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#76
post #68

How does this compare to Plex?

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 very easy and for Kodi, I had to do investigate all sorts of workarounds like creating "dynamic views" (or something similar I think) and even then it wasn't as smooth and easy as Plex. Also, some of the features require specific themes which is not a great design IMHO. Basically gave up and have continued with Plex - it seems to be the gold standard in the balance between polish and features (always happy to explore other options though).

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#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 scrape metadata reliably (I don't mind fixing a few things here and there)

- supports movies, tv shows, random videos

- automatic subtitle downloading

- supports music formats, podcasts, and audio books and understands they are different things, and can grab them as needed

- supports not only mp3s, oggs, etc. for music, but supports stuff their underlying media libraries already support like amiga mod, chiptune formats etc. (a major gripe of mine with plex). right now I need to convert to mp3 for this need, but the media libraries plex uses already supports these formats, it's just the damn gui and library indexing bits don't

- support for photo libraries

- ebooks, pdfs, cbz, cbr, etc. (I need extra apps for this)

- emulator support would be a super sweet stretch goal

- has smart tv apps would be also great, but chromecast support is fine

Does Kodi, emby, jellyfin, whatever support all this?

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#78
post #45
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To show just how much the XBMC Foundation is against using their work for piracy: They chose the name Kodi because it was the most protectable trademark they could claim, which opened an avenue for them to sue the drop-shippers for trademark violation.

I feel they’re in the same position Dolphin is - attempting to keep a center of respectability above what everyone knows the product is actually used for.

The emulation scene is more extra than I can handle atm, so I'll focus more on the XBMC Foundation:

What more can they do? They make a legal product with plenty of legal and licensed uses and they did their due diligence to prevent piracy via their product as much as possible. They also did so without being hostile to customers and unnecessarily locking-down their plugin system.

A little virtue signaling can go a long way sometimes.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#79

I run LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi, which is a just-enough-OS for Kodi. It works great, and is even a good choice for playing music over HDMI, because unlike some other music-playing distributions, it doesn't use ALSA, and simply bit-bangs the decoded audio out of the HDMI port. Works very well.

There's also OSMC, which is minimal Debian + Kodi.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#80
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…

No.

Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.

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