by dkobran on 12/21/21, 2:22 AM with 341 comments
by progman32 on 12/21/21, 6:56 AM
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?
by bane on 12/21/21, 6:10 AM
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?
by rglullis on 12/21/21, 5:01 AM
by dave_sullivan on 12/21/21, 5:12 AM
Running CoreELEC on an odroid N2+ now, highly recommended.
by StockHuman on 12/21/21, 3:35 AM
by blentrop on 12/21/21, 10:49 AM
This setup downloads everything for me once a movie or episode becomes available to download, and then I only watch content that is already downloaded using VLC. This is pretty good specially if your Internet connection is a bit spotty at times.
I've been using this setup for years now, and I'm pretty happy with it.
[0] https://sonarr.tv/ [1] https://radarr.video/ [2] https://lidarr.audio/ [3] https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
by LeoPanthera on 12/21/21, 4:14 AM
by hyperman1 on 12/21/21, 9:15 AM
It works flawlessly. The startup time is a bit slow, but once running, my 4 year old kid can choose his bed time series and watch 1 or 2 episodes on his own. My wife also knows her way around.
Now there are tons of unused options in there, but who cares. But I never had to mess around with the settings like the other poster experiences, it just works.
Only problem is I can't manage to play from the Nickelodeon website, but maybe a bit of googling might unearth a webbrowser plugin.
by don-code on 12/21/21, 3:48 AM
More recently, I've been running it on a Raspberry Pi 3A in my kitchen. It interacts with my DVR upstairs, so that I can pause TV there and pick it up downstairs. I credit the fact that it was originally designed to run on the Xbox as the reason it works as well as it does on even the original Raspberry Pi.
by DrewRWx on 12/21/21, 6:31 AM
One of the extensions it added was a front-end for https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/ , one of the original services for tunneling local multiplayer online.
Around the same time, https://dd-wrt.com/ added Linksys WRT54G builds with XLink Kai backend support. So I was able to load that build on my router and keep a persistent connection to service while using XBMC's frontend to pick a lobby and load Halo 2 from disc into multiplayer mode.
by mikeryan on 12/21/21, 3:41 AM
It's been pretty okay at what it does for a while now and has really been competing primarily with Plex as the place to store "your own copies of movies" and has really become the leading open source solution as Plex has become something of a commercial option.
by yboris on 12/21/21, 2:37 PM
I hope it is useful to some of you here.
Open source MIT: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
by Jnr on 12/21/21, 9:55 AM
Movie/show progress is synchronized to Trakt, and Trakt also provides list of trending shows and movies, so I always have an overview in a single place, no need to go to 10 different streaming services.
But the default UI is just terrible.
I use it with Arctic Horizon theme and it improves it a lot but not everything can be improved with custom theme. https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=351756
I wish they did a UI overhaul to make it a bit more modern.
Having customized it over the years, I see how powerful it can be, but defaults are quite unfriendly.
by sandreas on 12/21/21, 6:56 AM
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.
by jrm4 on 12/21/21, 2:18 PM
I'm surprised at what appears to be the lack of a simple and lightweight "10 foot interface" for Linux. You have projects like Kodi and KDE BigScreen, but (as most people are noting here) a lot of us don't need all the bells and whistles (and e.g. compositing).
A 10 foot browser + filemanager + music player + movie player would probably handle it. "Mouseless" would be nice, but maybe not even that?
Is this out there and a bunch of us are missing it? Basically a 10 foot openbox?
by psychstudio on 12/21/21, 3:47 AM
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.
by bitexploder on 12/21/21, 5:36 AM
by xfalcox on 12/21/21, 3:32 AM
by dakial1 on 12/21/21, 2:23 PM
The truth is that I didn't pirate because I wanted to pay nothing for media, I did it because I wanted the streaming experience and ability to have movies available on demand, not some cumbersome physical media whose purpose was only to guarantee studios/record labels profit at the expense of my consumption experience. They didn't care about me so I didn't care about them, something that changed with the coming of Netflix, Spotify, Google Music and all others... Now I gladly pay what I consider a fair fee for their services and amazing hassle-free experience. These wouldn't have happened (as quickly at least) without the 2000's piracy world and the media platforms build around it...
by thrusong on 12/21/21, 3:13 AM
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.
by mkdirp on 12/21/21, 10:17 AM
For anyone who uses a PVR device, I highly recommend using TVHeadend, with Kodi as a frontend it's been the perfect PVR system. TVHeadend allows to define multiple inputs (HDHomerun, DVB-C/T, IPTV, and lots others) and adds the rest of the tooling on top to have a full PVR system. TVHeadend itself has a really bad UI, and as lots of issues, but once set up, you do not have to care about its UI any more and you'll need it very little.
by mattowen_uk on 12/21/21, 12:42 PM
Granted, 90% of my Kodi viewing is Dr Who episodes[2] so I'm probably not the target market for it, but as long as you don't fiddle with it, it works just fine.
What I WOULD like is a new skin that strips everything out of the UI except my video library. I have absolutely no use for the music section, the photos(who seriously uses that?!) or the weather. I've briefly looked into the XML that is used for Kodi skinning, but life is too short for me even to want to go there.
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by wiz21c on 12/21/21, 10:23 AM
Is there a solution to RIP the DVD (I'm OK with it's just an ISO copy) while playing it ? So that I don't have to think about it first ?
by orloffm on 12/21/21, 9:12 AM
by jra_samba on 12/21/21, 5:40 AM
by bestouff on 12/21/21, 10:31 AM
- allow streaming audio to other computers for multi-room audio - allow streaming audio from phones or computers when I throw a party at home and people want to play DJ - allow streaming audio+video from a computer to use my big screen from a laptop without plugging wires
Of course there are some plugins that do a part of that, but they're hard to configure and break often (when they work); I'd really like that to work as simply and reliably as the media playing works now
by thesausageking on 12/21/21, 4:04 AM
by Ballu on 12/21/21, 8:48 AM
by sebow on 12/21/21, 1:15 PM
Good companion apps for kodi are KDE-Connect, bubbleupnp, UMS Server.
by mmlkrx on 12/21/21, 10:26 AM
Apart from piracy, what are legal ways to acquire my own media? When I can't find something on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I typically just buy it on Amazon but Amazon doesn't provide me with a video file. Are there any places I can buy digital media that allow me to download and manage my own media files?
by vaviloff on 12/23/21, 4:05 AM
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.
by fbanon on 12/21/21, 10:40 AM
by JetSpiegel on 12/27/21, 2:54 PM
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.
by eximius on 12/21/21, 5:44 AM
Honestly, the biggest problem is I probably need to organize my NFS so the dang indexing works. That was always the biggest problem I had in the past (and buffering/encoding stuttering, but that was from WiFi/weak RaspberryPi processing).
by gadders on 12/21/21, 9:23 AM
by Nux on 12/21/21, 7:47 AM
My living room main stack is Rpi+Libreelec+Kodi, it works wonderfully and it's my main way to consume media: video, music, inet radio and youtube.
I use the TV remote to control it via CEC in conjuction with the Yatse Remote app which gives me better control and allows me to do even more.
It's great.
by pabs3 on 12/22/21, 6:57 AM
by rhipitr on 12/21/21, 12:28 PM
by bennyp101 on 12/21/21, 9:11 AM
I think it was just after they rebranded to Kodi, something happened and it didn't work right - my memory is a bit hazy
by Minor49er on 12/21/21, 5:18 PM
by Sugimot0 on 12/21/21, 9:11 PM
by bung on 12/21/21, 7:04 AM
by jaimex2 on 12/21/21, 5:51 AM
Definitely not for your grandma though.
by deagle50 on 12/21/21, 4:41 AM
by netcyrax on 12/21/21, 5:43 AM
by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on 12/21/21, 11:55 AM
by rcpt on 12/21/21, 7:08 AM
by 28uwedj on 12/21/21, 3:33 AM
by shawnk on 12/21/21, 3:12 AM