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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?
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 few plugins and a single (TV) remote since it leaped from xbox to normal computers.
Only thing I don't like about it is that Netflix isn't on it.. but that's hardly Kodi's fault.
> 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.
I have been doing this all the time with Kodi. Just disable media scanning and browse through. I'm sold on Kodi because for years it has been the only way to watch video on my Linux NUC without tearing, it digests every media I can throw at it, and it's overall just very easy to configure and use.
It does sound like you've had slightly-more-than-average bad luck (I had some similar problems occasionally when I had Kodi on an RPi3, but it's been flawless for a year or so after I upgraded to RPi4), but you're certainly not wrong!
One point to consider, though, is that most TVs don't have built-in file managers (or, indeed, NAS-connection capability) - for folks who prefer to watch their media on a big screen, you need some client that can a) connect to your storage location, and b) play it out over HDMI etc. For me, Kodi is the best-functioning of those options.
If you're content with watching on a laptop/PC screen (or if your PC has your TV as an AV-out), however, then you're golden and there's nothing that Kodi really does over-and-above to make it worthwhile.
EDIT: Ah, I see[1] you do indeed have a PC connected to your TV. In which case - yeah, there's no reason not to do what you're doing!
The issue with Kodi is, in my opinion, the same as with setting up a mame cab for playing roms : Perpetual Work In Progress. Users are spending way more time configuring, optimizing, and eventually breaking the whole thing than actually enjoying it.
On my side, i'm playing my content with my AppleTV through a Plex server on a Nas, using wired network, and I couldn't be happier. Using a professionnal, closed, solution, sometimes make things better.
I'm using Kodi since several years for the family TV. I only had to tinker with the streaming buffer for YouTube, other than that it required no maintenance.
My wife can use it from her mobile. We can play movies for our kids or stream a YouTube-clip. I'm using a Firefox-addon to cast clips from my browser to Kodi. That's about it, no killer app, just convenient digital media on an old, dumb TV.
Only I'd wish Yatse was ported to iOS (Unless my wife's iPhone dies soon).
> Want to watch a movie? Navigate to it in my file manager and play it with VLC.
That's how I use Kodi on an (otherwise) headless HTPC (a RPi) connected to my TV. You don't need to build and maintain a content library, plugins, etc. Select Videos - Files, navigate to a folder, select the file and enjoy.
> What are people's favorite "killer apps" for software like Kodi? Is it just convenience and I've have had bad luck?
Control via a TV remote and no need to hook up my laptop to the TV every time is a killer convenience feature for me.
A key feature of Kodi for me is that it syncs the TV frame rate to the video that is playing. I don't know any other players on Linux that do that.
It's harder to do this with a remote control, and harder to hand the remote to a visitor and say 'watch whatever ya want' because there's no direction and the options are infinite and wait I didn't mean to delete that and wtf why is it trying to reboot for an update I don't know the password aaaaagh.
There's room for both, they're targeting entirely different crowds.
But yes, I absolutely do this too, it's so much more flexible and lets me run sponsorblock and other plugins in youtube/twitch/some random site I just found. Those are the real killer features for me, so it's very unlikely that any media-center app will ever convert me.
I would never use kodi over mplayer on my pc.
...but on a raspberry, running libreelec and with a bluetooth remote? that is the real kodi killer use case
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?
Kodi is the perfect example of how amateurs (in the good sense of the word) can make something long-lasting and provide an alternative that is better than whatever the "industry" wants to shove down our throats.
The real OGs had this running on a modded original Xbox when it was still xbmc. In order to watch MST3K episodes from emule.
Running CoreELEC on an odroid N2+ now, highly recommended.
For your consideration, Jellyfin. [0]
I have found that after trying a bunch of different setups during the years. Kodi, Plex, etc. I have settled on using: Sonarr[0], Radarr[1] and Lidarr[2]; combined with Jacket[3] and your favorite torrent downloader (I use Deluge). Add the TV Series you follow or movies you want to watch.
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
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.
I got an old PC my job was dumping(Haswell, I think), installed kodi, and put it under the TV. Then copied all our DVDs on the hard disk. Use the android app as remote.
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.
I used Kodi in its very early days as Xbox Media Center. XBMC turned the original-generation Xbox into a cheap and very functional media center PC - I actually didn't stop using mine until I upgraded to HD in the early 2010s.
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.
My favorite moment of project synergy was back when Kodi was called XBMC, it ran on the original Xbox, and it could be used as an alternate Xbox dashboard in addition to being a media library/player.
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.
For anyone new to it, Kodi is hardly new its been around for almost 20 years now, starting life as Xbox Media Player and later Xbox Media Center.
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.
For browsing, previewing, searching, and organizing videos I created Video Hub App. The primary feature is scrub / preview thumbnails from inside the video as you hover with your mouse and an infinite scroll of all your videos. It also has a "filmstrip" view to see all screenshots at once.
I hope it is useful to some of you here.
Open source MIT: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
I use Kodi as my main TV/Steambox UI. It handles movies, shows, twitch, live TV (wrote addon to work with local IPTV provider), launching Steam games, streaming from sources :).
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.
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.
Bit of a thread hijack, but:
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?
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.
We have a Linux server with Samba. Kodi connects to it beautifully. Even my kids can use it fine. Combine with VM that runs a VPN and deluge for optimal fun. Add a few simple IPTables rules to prevent traffic from leaking except over your VPN to calm down annoying Torrent monitors that your ISP might use. Been working for years. We vastly prefer to pay for content, but we ancient DVD rips and such that are not amenable to the modern media tech stack.
Kodi is awesome. The fact that it can run everywhere, with such a consistent UI is a great, and I have used it in x86 HTPCs, RPI, Android TV over the years.
Kodi, Plex, the late Boxee are all pioneers and the pillars of what streaming services have of user experience today. I remember when I first saw Boxee interface back at the piracy-wild-west era and thought how wonderful and easy it was to watch a movie with it. I even had transmission setup on a NAS (DNS-323) automatically downloading my preferred shows that appeared without much effort on my TV.
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...
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.
I've been using Kodi for some 5 years now. At the height of piracy addons here in the UK a few years ago I was quite worried that Kodi devs would just give up, and I'm glad they didn't.
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.
My Kodi set-up is a few-years-old copy of LibreELEC[1] set to NOT auto update.
I've barely configured it beyond giving the SMB paths to my video collection. I ignore all the meta-data rubbish it wants to add, and just browse to what I want to watch via the text-based list that's built into the default skin. It's all running on a Raspberry Pi 3b hooked into my big home theatre rig.
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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I've got about 200 DVD's but each time I look at Kodi (or others) it basically means : rip the DVD first... Which is the last thing I want to do when I want to actually look at the DVD.
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 ?
I use Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 3. It plays everything 1080p apart from h265 sources. Can't recommend enough.
I bought 3 OSMC Vero 4k boxes (https://osmc.tv/vero/). Basically a dedicated Kodi box on ARM hardware. Nothing but a happy customer, I use them to play content from my dedicated home server over SMB2.
I love Kodi, it runs my house for watching movies, listening to my mp3 collection or internet radios, and does it great. However what I'm really missing is a way to stream everything in and out:
- 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
How does this compare to Plex?
I used to play with these software long time back, Kodi was the last one before moving to "whatever" stick :)
(And I am not into media now)
But I have question regarding media, what are you going to play? Where are you going to download the movies/songs, etc unless use illegal ways.
It was amazing journey of few years for me, ripping CDs, DVDs, VCDs, BluRay, HD-DVD, etc and playing all those on TV with Kodi box. (Eventually moved to WDTV box).
If you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty, kodi is powerful and must-have software for consuming media in your home. However for the average user i might think it's a little bit overwhelming, of course this mainly depends on the wanted use.Plex might be suitable for most in that regard, emby used to be aswell though somehow they managed to fall a lot imo.
Good companion apps for kodi are KDE-Connect, bubbleupnp, UMS Server.
Right on the homepage it says "Kodi brings your media to life".
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?
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.
My gripe with Kodi is that it's horribly slow at scanning even my medium-sized (~1.5 TB) music collection. I've tried switching to UPnP so that the metadata is scanned locally on the media server, but Kodi's UPnP support is horribly broken. I've tried fixing some of the issues, but it's an endless rabbit hole of spaghetti code...
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.
Gah, I'm finally giving OSMC another try this year (tuned downstream distro of Kodi).
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).
The problem with these systems is limited smart TV support. Unfortunately none of them support Firefox OS any more. Plex used to, but had some row with Panasonic and removed it from the store. Now I just use the DLNA browser in my TV to find the video file I want to watch on my main PC.
Kodi is an absolute godsend!
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.
Maybe after the Software Freedom Conservancy lawsuit is won, Kodi will be able to run on Vizio TVs.
Is there not a getting started section on this page? After skimming the linked page and comments here, it seems to be very configurable in how it runs, but besides a community forum, is there just a general setup guide for a basic use case somewhere?
I used to use it when it was XBMC, but for some reason that escapes me now, I ended up switching to Plex, and stayed there.
I think it was just after they rebranded to Kodi, something happened and it didn't work right - my memory is a bit hazy