https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/us/bill-omar-carrasquillo...
So no.
The same goes for similar offerings like Jellyfin/Plex, if the end user uses a pirated streaming service that is on them and the service provider (which Omi was.) It was this which got him into trouble, not the fact he used Kodi.
- 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
Good companion apps for kodi are KDE-Connect, bubbleupnp, UMS Server.
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?
In some territories.
Though I would note breaking DRM to format shift content isn't legal in basically any functioning country in the world.
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.
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.
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).
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.
For the problem of running Kodi on the web and web-ish platforms, maybe WASM is the future? There is also emscripten for converting languages normally compiled to binaries to JavaScript.
For Brightscript, maybe a similar approach to emscripten would work, transpiling from other languages to Brightscript, possibly via JavaScript. Or I guess a second app based on Brightscript.
I think it was just after they rebranded to Kodi, something happened and it didn't work right - my memory is a bit hazy
Definitely not for your grandma though.
Eventually Kodi only felt useful if you wanted to dive into the world of streaming movies and shows from various shady sources.
Quite similar, but without all the invasive monitoring and telemetry. For example: you need an "account" to run plex on your local network.
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 examples of plugins and how people use them in a way that you can't with Plex.
Edit: One somewhat useful Reddit comment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/mciv5l/kodi_vs_...
This is a departure from the traditional XBMC-on-device that also acts as the client trying to play any format of content.
Kodi is amazing and I’d use it if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t want a new interface, I simply want my “owned” content to show up as Yet Another App on my stream boxes and phones. Plex fits that bill.
plex was made later on when having multiple devices (desktop, laptop, phone, tablet etc) was a bit more common, so now instead of having all your media stuck on one device you instead run it on a server and connect to that server using an app on each device.
so that's the fundamental difference between them anyway. one is mainly design to be used on 1 devices while the other is design to be used on many
- 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.
My last info was, that we don't process anything in parallel, as the old xml scrapers were not optimized for that. As we're moving to python scrapers now, we should be able to optimize the interface to handle more in parallel. That was the plan at least, but XML scrapers first need to be removed, as they hold back the API.
AFAIK it is not free.
NDI captures the entire screen, so I open Kodi, and it captures both audio and video. There's no need to integrate it with Kodi, it just works.
Then it can be seen in other computers in the same network.
When searching for a media platform, I tried various ones including Kodi (and the various forks/environments like LibreElec et. al), Plex and others.
I also have a folder hierarchy which Kodi doesn't respect (very annoying) and played around with Plex as well.
However, I am unwilling to log in and share telemetry about my own personal library with Plex.
As such, I went with MythTV, which isn't as slick as Plex or Kodi, but does most of the job (that is, manage my local media library). It lacks in streaming options, including podcasts and the devs seem much more focused on the DVR than anything else.
That said, for what it does, MythTV is pretty good, but there's a lot it doesn't do.
MythTV[0] does okay with video and music libraries.
It's available as packages on most distributions[1] which allows me to keep my front end and back ends synched just by performing regular package updates.
It is open source and can also be compiled from source[2] if you prefer it that way.
I run my back end on a VM with 4GB RAM and 2 vCPUs. My front end is a fanless miniPC[3] (I bought it almost three years ago, so I'm sure you can do better now for the same money) which renders 1080p/Stereo (I don't have a surround-sound system, but that's definitely supported) via HDMI pretty flawlessly. I imagine that a newer front end device could easily handle 4K (although I don't have a device to display that) resolution.
Edit: I'd add that the front end and back and can run on the same system, but the physical layout of my home made it more useful to split the two.
The Mythtv Wiki[4] is also pretty good for many set up/configuration issues.
It's not perfect by any measure, but it does the job without telemetry or external dependencies.
Core MythTV development seems pretty active, but the broader "ecosystem" (plugins, addons, etc.) is very weak.
[1] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Packages#Targeted_Linux_Distribu...
[2] https://www.mythtv.org/download
[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NXPSCK9
[4] https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Main_Page
Edit: Fixed front end/back end. Added the missing link.
Because of a limited world view. Movies are ONLY one thing. SciFi OR Comedy. Not both. Never both.
Because the idea behind a genre-based movie directory hierarchy is _genius_, and the tens of thousands of people that don’t fight the practical organization methods of media catalogs are sheep.
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?
Only thing I don't like about it is that Netflix isn't on it.. but that's hardly Kodi's fault.
It wouldn't be HN if I didn't correct you in that it was originally XBMP on the old Xbox, before it graduated to a media center.
It was a revelation in that the UI was amazing for the time, and the hardware was good enough to decode everything available.
I remember soldering in an extra IR eye so that I could power on and off the Xbox with the official Media Remote using a special key combination.
If you are interested in the latest Kodi, check out "libreelec" [0] a maintained fork of "openelec". "openelec" support was dropped in 2017 [1].
My main use case for it actually was wanting to watch netflix, youtube and prime on my desktop monitor from my office couch. The two main issues were lack of a remote and the lack of native support in kodi for any of those streaming platforms. The first issue was solved with this nifty little unit: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WQG6A8C. The second was solved with a kodi plugin called web launcher. I had to mod the plugin to make it launch pages in kiosk mode on the leftmost of my dual displays (basically passing a custom command line to chrome), and I am not sure whether it has been updated for py3-based kodi.
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.
What made Kodi/xbmc great was the interface worked better on a couch using a game controller to navigate versus a traditional desktop where i'd be forced to use a keyboard+mouse.
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!
Lack of a built in file manager on any device is an excellent indicator of "how bad the manufacturer is trying to reduce your freedom."
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.
Another path is to go in search of a better way to enjoy the music.
Both have their value, but if you start down the path of looking for the better way, don't lose track of the original goal. Too many audiophiles are still listening to their equipment instead of the music.
(Same goes for people playing vintage video games, watching movies, writing things by hand with fountain pens, supporting sports teams... this is a core part of modern civilization, I think.)
When I used Kodi that was part of the appeal.
But then I had two Kodi boxes and media on a NAS and wanted them to sync played status. Eventually Emby with the Kodi Sync plugin was the way to do that instead of trying to share a database.
But then I got an Apple TV 4K, and the Emby app runs on that too, and now same as you it’s what I end up using.
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).
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.
MadVR know their stuff, they recently announced a very expensive home theatre video processor [1].
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.
...but on a raspberry, running libreelec and with a bluetooth remote? that is the real kodi killer use case
I did have similar experiences with Kodi in the past. What I realized is that many plugins are of really poor quality and can mess up Kodi in very unexpected ways - the way issues manifest may not hint at a plugin being at fault. No sandboxing and a bunch of dubious Python modules. And that's besides all the possible security issues.
Nowadays I just have a basic skin + JellyConn and it's been very solid and smooth.
The Kodi plugin ecosystem is really alluring with all the possible features but it's a can of worms. Kodi itself is quite stable and predictable otherwise, in my experience.
EDIT: Oh, and I don't have much to say about Kodi media library organization - it seems a bit finicky so I'd do that either manually like you're already doing or with some other software more suited for it (Sonarr+Radarr/Jellyfin/any other good recommendations?)
Then someone advised me on buying a nVidia Shield on which I put Kodi. And from there it was a completely different experience. Just controlling everything from a remote with my thumb, on a unified interface, with more information (posters, synopsis, status of viewing, resuming, sync with my Trakt[1] profile...) Then I bought a Logitech Harmony remote, so I was able to control my whole setup (TV + soundbar + nVidia Shield) with a single remote.
But I had more and more issues with Kodi, plugins failing, crashes... and with Netflix I took the habit of being able to resume somewhere (browser, smartphone) else what I started on the TV. Something not supported by Kodi because it's only a local player. So I looked at Plex and my experience improved even more.
Now with Plex I have my own "Netflix" so I can start something in a browser at work, resume it on my smartphone in the bus and finish it in my couch on my TV at home. And I can share this with friends and family! I don't have to ask them for a USB key to share files. Or setup a weird FTP access for them to download the files. They have a nice UI to do what they want : consume a media file that they know I have. It's accessible from everywhere : browsers, smartphone, tablets, media box, smart TV... And I can even play my own music on my Sonos players!
There's a lot of things for which I like to hack stuff and all that. But I don't want to have to do that to watch a movie. I want a simple and user-friendly UX. And that's exactly what Kodi and even more Plex offers.
So to me the first and biggest game changer was to have a smartphone-like experience on my TV, with a small device in one hand I was able to switch apps and enjoy my media in a nice UI.
[1] : https://trakt.tv/
Currently I'm using the ATV 4K and Infuse (and MBP SMB share) for "other" content. Works a dream.
This 100%. Mini PC's are cheap and hook to TVs just as easily.
Years back A friend who lived int he country side wanted to watch a specific Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. I had it on my server at home and I also happened to have my Linux laptop with me. So I plug my laptop into the TV, sshfs mounted my servers video directory and played it using VLC on his big screen. Took maybe 5 minutes to setup and he was thoroughly impressed that I have "my own streaming service".
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.
This is probably beside the point, but thinking back, XBMC made a lot of sense back in 2003 when it was released. It wasn't as feasible to a) have an entire spare PC and b) hook it up to the TV easily. I certainly didn't have HDMI or even VGA on my TV back then, only composite and maybe component analog video...
I use a wireless keyboard+trackpad combo as a remote which I leave out of the way inside my living room table when not in use.
And honestly, I don't see why that's not a common practice. Super easy to use.
No Android fiddling needed at all.
(typically when I mention this, somebody will helpfully pipe up that "It's easy! You just need to download this, that and other thing; open up these ports; setup the server and TV on its VLAN; make sure that these drivers and codecs are installed and updated; etc etc etc" with zero awareness of how much extra work it is compared to "double click on movie file" :D )
I do the same on my PCs, however in my bedroom Kodi is king. I use it on a Raspberry PI which has a good CEC implementation, which means one can use both the TV and Kodi from the same remote: super convenient. I also have a Bluetooth keyboard with trackpad and a 2nd SD with Manjaro Linux ready, but they stay mostly unused. I'm in the process of replacing the RPi with a Chromebox, which has a much better desktop performance than the RPi, but have to wait for the CEC-HDMI external interface to arrive since the Chromeboxes don't support it.
I run apache and dump videos for the family in a web root and everyone knows that media.local gets them to the files - everything can play mp4 as is at this point (vlc if you want to be fancy or just a regular browser), even the boys firestick/silk has zero issue playing back FullHD 1080 mp4 in browser.
Total maintenance time averaged over a year, 2 minutes.
Wireless controller support isn't an issue I have a wireless keyboard with a touchpad built in and that is the "TV remote".
I’m really hoping that Matter’s open casting protocol takes off, and we can get a new generation of software that combines the best of "self-hosted open-source interoperable ecosystem" and “one tap on the phone to have something playing on the big screen”...
What I liked much better than Kodi was WiiMC on the original Wii. It was similar in that you point at a SMB share and just go, but navigating with a wiimote was pleasurable in its own right. Made for a nicer experience.
One day I will invest some time and see if there is a PC equivalent to WiiMC that runs on modern hardware and supports modern codecs.
kodi is definitely a bit complex at the best of times though. trying to set up the home screen and menus exactly how you like it can be very tedious and using the jellyfin plugin is just adding another layer of complexity on top of all that.
im thinking i might just try a plain OS soon that opens jellyfin media player app on boot. it probably wouldn't be able to do as many things from the remote as kodi but maybe something like that KDE Connect that your using might be the way to go when i have to do anything complicated
I wanted to tinker with Proxmox so the Jellyfin server is virtualized, but running it directly on the host/hypervisor OS is probably a better choice in order to transcode with the GPU. GPU passthrough in Proxmox is not intuutive and I deemed it not worth the troubles for my use case.
I have a network storage shared with the different VMs and containers, an airsonic server, a podcast downloader (airsonic being not so good at that), a DNS, Kiwix, Calibre, Komga for use with Tachiyomi (lots of work to set up good content) and a few social games (pictionary, posio, codenames etc).
`ssh user@host cat file.mkv | mplayer`
it's more one of those things that spark joy because of how weird it is, but I end up using it all the time.
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?
Running CoreELEC on an odroid N2+ now, highly recommended.
My setup would automatically record the 1 hour block of BBC World News and transcode it to make it suitable for the PSP so I could watch it on the train to work.
I personally prefer JellyCon as it’s more lightweight and works smoother for low-resource devices. Jellyfin-Kodi has more features and deeper integration with the library.
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
Kodi is an amazing project and deserves much praise.
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.
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.
It inspired me so much that in my second (or "interests") University of California admission essay I wrote at length about the experience and others like compiling and loading Rockbox on my DAP. In a happy twist, I was still offered a Regent Scholarship to a a few UC campuses. Even ones I didn't apply to.
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.
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.
*My timeline is prolly slightly off, but those are the major plot beats.
I hope it is useful to some of you here.
Open source MIT: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
Do you use sqlite under the hood? Also, what's the largest collection / folder size that you know videohub can handle?
Also, I just bought it anyway -- I am impressed at how you donate a generous portion of every sale to charity!
I've had no problems with 20,000 videos in a "hub" and I've heard people pushing past 100k. JavaScript has no problem applying .filter() across this many objects quickly.
Each search is its own .filter method (inside an Angular pipe) so every search should be virtually instant. And since the screenshots are pre-extracted (the most time-consuming part of using the app), you should be able to infinite-scroll with no delays in loading previews.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Windows Media Player must also be used a incredible amount to watch pirated content, but it's not a label we put on it.
Any stats to back "the vast majority"? Isn't that to be expected of literally any media player software? You obviously need a number of non drm-crippled media to watch and you care about quality/features/availabilty:
Just insane, sorry.
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...
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.
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.
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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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 ?
It doesn't sound like it is a major factor in your use case, but Kodi is one of the few players that not only can play directly from ISOs either compressed or uncompressed.
I find it already pretty incredible we have so advanced solutions mostly open source. I mean, as commercial software I only used Apple's offering (FrontRow ?), it was financed by an already pretty strong company who had all the incentives to make it a compelling thing, and it only did a tenth perhaps of what is requested there. Doesn't feel like a surprise if Plex was trying to get more funding to keep the product dev ongoing for the next years.
Your expectations from one piece of software are completely unrealistic.
If your goal is organization, there are plenty of other tool specific to the individual purposes. If your goal is consumption kodi can server as a launcher to other applications. Adding the functionality is techincally possible but would require addons.
It's interesting that the parent expects this to all be a single piece of software. Is this a generational thing? It's the opposite of the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy I grew up on.
I like Jellyfin a lot but I actually sometimes feel like it tries to do too much.
I guess it depends on the perspective. For me, just wanting to stream movies from my NAS anywhere Plex works beautifully.
So I found that the only way to get a media solution was to compromise.
I thought I needed a media server / streamer. Not sure why. Maybe because I started with Plex years ago, and that's what it is. I dropped Plex because I don't trust them, and they force me to log into their service.
I switched to Jellyfin because it's the most recommended alternative (and is a more 'free' fork of Emby). But I thought it was garbage. It had extremely slow media indexing, to the point where it was unusable. What made that worse was that there was no feedback in the UI telling me what files it was choking on, and its logs are abysmal. It's basically a black box, and it just gets stuck constantly. After about 2 weeks flogging a dead horse I gave up.
Right now I run Kodi on a raspberry pi 4, which sits behind my TV. It's not a server or streamer, it's a media player. But you know what? That's fine. Because it just works. It's hooked up to a 4TB USB disk. It boots off an m2 SSD in a USB enclosure. I ditched the chromecast, and installed an Android app to control Kodi. Best part is that it's just a computer with all my media on it so I can just use a keyboard+mouse and navigate to files if I want.
If I wanted a 2nd or 3rd TV, honestly I'd just duplicate the setup and use Syncthing to keep media in sync between them, giving the added benefit of data redundancy.
Wondering why you wouldn't consider adding a NAS/SMB into the mix if you were adding a 2nd or 3rd head to the mix instead of syncing across disks?
Plex can do most of the first few things you list without issue.
- movie access - chrome cast - metadata - supports movies/tv (why would you want it to support random videos? Such a weird request) - automatic subtitles AFAIK these all work out of the box
It also supports photo libraries but imo, it’ shouldn’t. Podcasts, again Are feature creep. Audiobooks can be setup and work wonderfully, it just takes a little bit of work and an app like “prologue” on iOs (a fucking amazing app imo)
Your next point about supporting a cornucopia of obscure audio formats is insane imo.
Eboo also make absolutely no sense.
Emulator support? this can’t be serious.
Ultimately, I don’t always agree with the new features that are prioritized, but Plex overall is an amazing app. They also have released really great quality of life features recently too, like skipping intros in tv shows is such a cool idea, and it works really well imo. Also, IPTV/ dvr support has been improving rapidly.
Nothing is ever going to support your list of requirements, and even if something did, it would be such a bloated mess.
Seriously though you are asking a lot here.
I can't figure out how to get subtitles for stuff I DVR off my OTA TV so this would be nice for me and I am not a pirate.
- 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.
The developers also have no concept of security past the very basics. Make sure you run it in a network namrspace or something otherwise it will accidently bind to random network interfaces even though you told it to use the loopback address. The devs don't seem to think this is a problem. Falling back to a public interface is a feature that prevents support requests.
* multi-user with setting limits and access * multiple devices * chromecasting everything * native apps (the one for firetv works perfect) * meta data scrapping * automatic subtitle downloading and managing * creating playlists and collections
I tried using jellyfin also for: * music * audiobooks * ebooks but without any satisfactory success. I now use calibre-online for ebooks and am yet to find something good for audiobooks/music.
I don't think you will ever find a PERFECT selfhosted completely opensource tool for everything and by now i think that's fine.
I've stopped using it at home because it keeps on wanting to transcode files for me even if I configured it not to and having gigabit ethernet. And it destroys my server's CPU doing so since I'm not that rich to have a spare video card around.
For whatever bizarre reason, Plex all but requires you conform to specific filename formats. I don't why, but this pisses me off to no end.
What's the point of having elaborate media containers like MKV if you can't just point to an arbitrarily named file, process, fill-in, or read the metadata and have it added to your library? I mean, Plex maintains a database, can read metadata, pull info from moviedb, tag stuff, categorize... what's up with the obsession on filenames?
Idk, on Kodi I had to rename my files a certain way for them to be associated with metadata from IMDB & all, so I was used to having Filebot[1] doing the job for me. When I switched to Plex, I didn't even think about it, I kept renaming my files with Filebot. Also I prefer the light and clearer pattern that is resulting from Filebot instead of having weird filenames depending on the release.
[1] : https://www.filebot.net/
Your solution works for MKV files. The Plex solution works for all file types and containers.
It's easy to see why Plex would prefer this way.
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".
I'm already using VLC and accessing content via local network, but this looks a lot more polished and always good to have a backup/alternative.
No games or mame but everything else on the list is covered. Kodi is fun but having to educate the non technical household members how to use it is not fun.
Thats what killed the old HTPC concept for me. Too much fiddling, not enough watching.
Chromecast nearly cracks this problem, but playing local media has always needed weird fragile browser extensions in my experience.
Maybe you could run it through a capture card and pipe that to whatever, but it's a lot more expensive.
Pirating content is just something people do because it's technically feasible. To silence the cognitive dissonance and justify the behavior towards their peers and reconcile it with the rest of their character (presumably they would not steal physical objects with a clear ownership status), this narrative of a morally motivated fight against the big bad recording company or film studio is employed. It's intellectually dishonest.
> Isn't that to be expected of literally any media player software?
I guess how you define the term. Apple TV? No, I’d say the majority of users are watching copyrighted DRM streams. But it’s definitely media player software.
Maybe newer TVs (this one's 10 years old) have support for more codecs, but I'm not inclined to replace it when it otherwise continues to work well. I'll just drive it with a Raspberry Pi running Kodi and call it good.
You can also use apt to customize OSMC because it's based on Debian[1].
The maintainer, Sam Nazarko seems really helpful too.
[1] https://osmc.tv/wiki/general/installing-packages-via-apt/
There is some line but it's unclear and I don't know exactly how to draw it
Serious question, because most people just do media in their browser or iTunes (or equivalent from various streaming services) at this point.
Is VLC a piracy tool? What about mpv?
I suspect you are deciding what a tool is for and then deciding the motivations of that tool's users based on what you decided the tool is for.
Compare: The vast majority of lockpick owners just think it's a fun skill. They never use the picks other than on locks that are explicitly purchased for picking (locks they or a friend own, usually not actually locking anything, etc). Yet when traveling to (e.g. defcon) places where they will be socially lockpicking with other enthusiasts, the TSA often harasses people for being theives. It's happened to me and plenty of others because folks decide the intent based on the tool.
Almost. I had a set of ffmpeg scripts that would encode blu-rays at 720p just so so it would playback without any dropped frames. But yeah, everything else was fantastic.
Did you get it off #xbins? I think that was the only place to find binaries of it without building it yourself.
https://github.com/Sandmann79/xbmc
https://github.com/anxdpanic/plugin.video.tubed
These might work better than using web launcher.
Now why would your reply completely ignore the actual likelihood of an event?
You have no idea how many people use Kodi to manage their dvds they ripped using handbrake, for example. None. Zero. You have no idea how many people use kodi for streaming Al-Jazeera news or msnbc/fox disinformation. So now you're just speculating and trying to claim a useful tool, like a car, can be used in association with an illegal act, like a bank robbery getaway car. That's it. Even if you did have actual data, which you don't, it's utterly irrelevant. There is are multiple ordinary, expected, and designed for legal uses of kodi. Kodi is being used legally, properly and ethically by a great many people. That is clear and not in dispute.
Take it one step further to see it with stunning clarity. What percentage of home computers have been used in some fashion with copyrighted material where Disney et al claim they should be paid ever more and have repeatedly changed laws by paying large sums to politicians to effect that law-enforcement supported revenue increase? With no data someone claims "most home computers are used this way" and makes your comment about ignoring likelihood when called out for it. It really is just a nuts analysis and should be called as such.
As for the pi, it's connected straight to the TV's HDMI. It has a 7.1 USB audio that connects it to an ancient Yamaha receiver. I have no other media sources, and the TV is one of those digital signage models that has no smart features or tuners. So there's nothing complicated to do really. The Pi puts the screen to sleep when there's nothing playing.
Also, file lists order folders and files independently.
If not for those two things, Kodi would be perfect.
So, yes, Kodi is flexible, but too tricky for leisure use.
Moreover, they correctly understand what the TV industry works so hard to obscure. It's computers all the way down. If you're gonna slap a computer on my screen, then let me use it as a general purpose computer. If, however, you insist on putting a computer on my screen that I hate, then make it easy for me to avoid it.
And of course, we know why they don't do this -- the low cost of the TV is subsidized by the data they sell to others gained by spying on you.
> They want "just a screen" precisely so that they can use whatever they want on it, including filemanagers if they wish.
Yep - and if the screen is "just a screen" (i.e. has no file manager or other media-interfacing functionality on it), there there will need to be some _other_ computer in the stack of "computers all the way down" to provide the media-interface. For me, Kodi does that job perfectly well, but it doesn't work well for everyone.
> the low cost of the TV is subsidized by the data they sell to others gained by spying on you.
Yes, this is an uncontroversial statement of a distasteful truth.
Chromecast is now either the action you take to "beam" from your handheld device to a TV or an AndroidTV/GoogleTV/Chromecast hybrid device.
Just went to the google store to find a link for you and had some trouble finding what I'm talking about and apparently chromecast devices are now considered part of the Nest family complicating things even more.
https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv_com...
Edit: I stand somewhat corrected... there still is a chromecast device that comes without AndroidTV. I guess this just further illustrates my point about how bad/confusing google's naming and branding strategy is.
In this case I believe the above commenter was just implying to use your home PC as your Media server, install VLC on the Chromecast with Google TV, and then play the media back on the Chromecast via the Network share.
I started with an old nslu2, the pi on my network is slug5, as its the fifth machine that has done this job over about 15 years or so.
VLC installed on the chromecast works well with the little remote control, so local media is no harder than netflix or prime.
Edit: the original streamer I used was a Neuston mc-500, which could access network files. The nslu2 was a little slow, but 15 years ago media files were much smaller too. You could record digital tv with a usb dongle and play it back on the neuston which amazed me at the time.
Edit2: the kids had hacked PS2s in their bedrooms that had media players on them that pulled data from the nslu2 as well. It was cool, cheap and worked well.
I would like to be able to just point to a file and tell Plex what that file is so it "knows" (puts it in it's database). If it can read/write metadata on the file itself, that would be great too.
That's like arguing that they prefer an unsorted pile of thousands of books vs. a library/bookstore. I mean if that's how they want it then fine, but you don't get the useful features.
There are a multitude of metadata managers out there which don't require the same directory structure but they are a load more effort than automatic metadata matching and a lot more effort than simply organizing your media in the first place.
Disney (and friends) spend the GDP of a small country to ensure that my entire life is surrounded by their products and enshrined themselves in international treaties to ensure that it will remain so. I could stop consuming their media, which would require me to withdraw from 90% of all movies and music that my friends and family want to watch, which whether I like it or not is what I would call "my culture".
I don't think this is fair, specially considering that I had no say in this state of things and that changing it would require me to essentially mobilize my entire nation against the foreign interests of the USA.
I don't expect everyone to agree with this point of view, but to call it "intellectually dishonest" feels to me like an unnecessary agression. If anything, I would counterargue: expecting people to either pay a toll to access their culture or to to become "cultural monks" is what's truly wrong, especially when there's an alternative that literally favors the interests of people over corporations.
I have and will gladly pay money for authors/developers that really get me excited, though consuming so much interesting content for free can make me pretty jaded. To a pirate, paying for certain software might as well be giving a donation.
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.
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.
if you want your media to be playable basically everywhere, use h264/AVC.
sure a hvec-file would be about half the size but who cares?
It has an edit button in the UI for entering in the metadata to its database manually.
It has the option to prefer metadata already stored locally inside the container when populating its database.
It has the "match" button for interactively discovering and retrieving the metadata from an agent like IMDb or tvdb regardless of filename.
By default it tries to spare you having to do any of these things, but they put a lot of work into facilitating several alternatives when you'd rather do the work yourself.
Again, I was just curious if there was any reasons I couldn't think of why the top-level's comments were unfulfillable! I'm always curious about people's desires that (apparently) can't (or won't) be solved with software. This is a space I'm not too familiar with, but there doesn't seem to be any technical reasons why someone should have desires that get pushed against.
Certainly there may be practical reasons, I just wanted to try to pinpoint it a little bit. As an example - although I don't personally see much value in it - the audiobook thing seems like a relatively simple addition that I could see value in. I use Spotify for music, news, podcasts, and audiobooks (the last one is a lie, but I did discover there are audiobooks on Spotify to help my point). I could see the value in having these all on my tv - I just don't have one. But if I were in a situation where the tv was the typical media center, why not have it play audiobooks? It's actually a rather ideal platform for common audiobook consumption. As a recent comment somewhere here mentioned, people (presumably) tend to listen to audiobooks somewhat in the background. It seems handy to have a giant screen that could visibly show the current and recent text in an easy way. I find myself sometimes watching or listening to something where I have a momentary lapse in comprehension and I have to scrobble (do people use that term? Scroll? Seek?) a few seconds back to get the "umph" of a scene, sentence, or general point. If I were someone that listened to audiobooks while cleaning around the house or something, it seems handy to quickly read the missing few words to get the point rather than looking for my phone, unlocking it, looking for whatever app is playing the audiobook, getting distracted by other open apps, getting back to the audiobook app, and rewinding well past the point I missed because scrobbling across a 2 inch wide screen for a 10 hour book by a minute is impossible.
Weird rant. I have no horse in this. Just unemployed and this happened to mentally stimulate me I guess.
But I guess I could always just try mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.[0] :)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Edit: I'm leaving the usage as-is, but I seem to have used "scrobble" incorrectly. I think "seek" is probably the correct term. For some reason just yesterday I was thinking about "scrobbling" and I misremembered its functionality. Oops!
Why merge Spotify with Netflix? Just have two apps and services, is not that difficult for the user, nor a real nuissance. The OP didn't request audiobooks. He specifically asked also for PDF, a comic format (CBR) and "etc.". That, I guarantee you, lead to further requests (highlite the PDFs, a unified comic/pdf/movie/music storage and showroom, screencap, sharing...). Add a lot of underlying complexity, bugs, cost in manteinance, extra mental load...
As for the "ideal audiobook reader platform" let me tell you something: audiobooks are consumed by people while walking, running, driving, at the gym, in the sub... I've never heard of anyone planted in front of the reader just hearing the audiobook. The nature of audiobooks is "hear a book while doing something else", and a TV goes against exactly that. A TV audiobook is called "a movie" or "a serie", something that you can already watch in Kodi.
This reminds me of the "4 star but..." in the App Stores. Lots and lots of users of a nice free app comment like "I LOVE the app, but I only rate it with 4 stars unless you add this little, small, really tiny thing that I want. If you do that, I will come back and give you the 5th star".
I don't know the use case where being able to read eBooks from the television is desirable. It certainly doesn't meet my definition of shared entertainment, which is something that media centers are intended for. They're media, yes, and they can be organized, sure--but is there a common use case for reading from the large screen? Unless one is disabled, I really don't see one.
However if looking for a better merge of Kodi and gameplaying I cannot recommend Batocera enough. It has a large retrocomputing (emulation) capability and also supports many DOS games and Windows games via dosbox or wine and has recently added Steam integration. On the media side of things it can be configured to automatically load kodi and seamlessly transition from Kodi to the Emulation Station frontend.
There will be some configuration but once configured it has in my experience generally stayed configured well and can be a set and forget type of appliance if you take the time to organize your games and media and then leave it alone after scraping. Also it's been one of the easiest configurations I've done in a long time. I encourage everyone to look into it.
I think the Emby's, Kodi's, and Plex's of the world should focus on the "home Theater" space, making the best experience for the consumption of Movies and TV Shows. maybe music if they want to stretch
There should be separate apps for ebooks, podcasts, etc. I do not (and I am sure very few do) consume ebooks, and podcasts on my Large TV. That is where the "home theater" apps should focus, the TV Watching experience.
I understand sometimes people use a computer monitor, or even a mobile app to view it but I would image that is an edge case, and should not be the focus, when I want to watch a movie I am doing it on my 60in screen not my 5.5in
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.
If I create something it's not your culture unless I decide to share it.
However, it does become my culture once my entire city is plastered with posters for it, its music plays on every radio twice a day, my children play with toys based on its characters, and/or conversations with my friends refer to it years after the thing came out.
Right off the bat, anyone can contest:
- "only"
- "immoral"
- "assaults"
- "ethical"
Your comment provides no context or support for any of these.
It's disgraceful.
This is the most sensible argument I've heard for being anti-piracy. It is a matter of means, and I've had a similar experience with my approach to piracy.
I'd be interested to know more statistics about what demographics perform piracy and on what kinds of media.
You know the one.
But I’m not sure what the Discordians would do with all that money.