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Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

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Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#91

Post by marderfarker2 »

harrisi wrote: post #86
a254613e wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.

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.

I’d rather the app be a master of one than a jack of all trades

Plex is very good when it comes to “just works” for media consumption. That “just works” experience (API enrichment, artwork sourcing, device verification etc.) isn’t easy to maintain.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#92

Post by puchatek »

harry8 wrote: post #75
afavour wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try "cars are used to commute". Still insane? No, because that's a very likely usecase. Just like playing pirated content via a media center.

Now why would your reply completely ignore the actual likelihood of an event?

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#93

Post by progman32 »

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 than just enjoying my media. My friend (Plex and Kodi user) had the same issues, we'd usually spend an entire beer at the start of the evening troubleshooting things. The most lasting thing from those days was setting up a proper NAS, first to house my media, then everything else.

The main thing I miss is wireless controller support, but KDE Connect on my phone has completely obviated that. It even integrates with streaming sites, youtube, VLC, Audacious, almost everything that exposes a media API. So I can sit on my couch or walk around and control my KDE machine with minimal effort. My PC audio playback even pauses when I get a phone call. If I need more control I can use my phone's screen as a touchpad mouse. You can't easily remotely compose playlists with this setup but I usually listen album by album or on global shuffle, and that's good enough for me.

Am I just old school? What are people's favorite "killer apps" for software like Kodi? Is it just convenience and I've have had bad luck?

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#94

Post by sandreas »

Kodi is awesome... I'm currently developing a little helper to link RFID cards to specific actions (like play an audio or video file). Everyone who is insterested in Kodi should definitely take a look at the "all in one" distributions for Raspbery and friends:

Libreelec (https://libreelec.tv/, sucessor of OpenElec) is a superfast standalone OS that can be flashed and has autoupdate - due to readonly FS it is not as customizable, than raspbian, but therefore very easy and fast.

OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) is similar to Libreelec, but with support for installing extra packages, but a little slower boot time and non-readonly-FS. Ideal if you would like to make use of custom scripts, GPIO buttons, RFIDs or webcam.

Kodi also has a HUGE JSONRPC-API (https://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v12), that supports nearly every feature to be controlled remotely via script or App and has a pretty nice webinterface.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#95

Post by bb88 »

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 was most disappointed when they got rid of the cloud sync and things. Servers should sync between each other easily, but they don't. And the plex channels are mostly worthless, the entire point of plex is for people to bring their own content.

I'm also not a big fan of the youtube algorithm. It would be super nice just to have a "channel first"/"category first" way of viewing youtube instead of an "algorithm that knows better than you".

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#96

Post by amitport »

bane wrote: post #85
a254613e wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.

Why?

Every feature seems simple by itself, but considering the overall scope and the maintenance effort, you will need dozends of people working full time on this. (I worked at such a very for profit media tech company)

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#97

Post by oefnak »

harrisi wrote: post #86
a254613e wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.

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.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#98

Post by stjohnswarts »

bane wrote: post #85
a254613e wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.

Why?

Because people want a massive piece of software for free and "expect it". I mean we would all love to have what you typed out there but it would be a massive effort and not likely to happen anytime soon. Jellyfin and Calibre do a lot of what you have there but probably not even the majority of it and certainly not flawlessly

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#99

Post by Dedime »

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…

As far as Jellyfin goes in my own experience:

- Supports phone / tablet / browser / roku / others

- Can chromecast

- Supports movies, tv. Not sure about random videos but I suppose you could do it.

- Supports subtitle downloading

- Haven't used it myself, but supports podcasts, books, photos, music

Also FOSS. Doesn't have the same motive as commercial software ala Plex to nag you, and it hasn't nagged me yet.

Re: Kodi: An Open Source Home Theater System

#100

Post by nonbirithm »

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…

This is fair, but I've found that I want to watch my content on a television instead of my computer monitor, since I already have everything set up. Unfortunately, it seems that there aren't many good options for just playing files on the network natively using Android TV alone.

It seems that a lot of people reach for Plex or similar in this situation, but setting up Plex requires a separate computer to serve the files. If all you want to do is play videos on your local network, then Kodi might be a suitable option, since it can run directly on hardware like smart TVs without the need to set up a separate computer.

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