Kodi is great. But each time I have upgraded it some things have improved and somethings have stopped working. Currently the guide doesn't show which items are being recorded and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop series record. But I am too scared to upgrade in case it breaks everything!
I've been using Kodi since 2007, my NAS is a USB 3.0 HDD plugged into an Asus router. Its been great and more independent than Plex. I won't be updating to v19 anytime soon though. Us FireTV users have been manually updating for ages, so its finally paying off now. Given from this thread I've learned that v19 on Android has no maintainer, and addons are broken, that double whammy means I'd recommend waiting until 18.9 or its addons stop working correctly.
Sounds like for Shield users, the best option is to sideload the F-Droid apk to avoid having the same signature as the Play store version, to avoid having to disable all updates.
Not much else to do, just yet another project that's a casualty of Python 3.
Has anyone migrated from Plex to Kodi who can weigh in on whether it was worth it? I have a solid little raspberry PI based home media streaming & download setup, with Plex as the central media app, but I’ve been curious about if kodi is wholesale better in some regards.
I couldn't figure out how to bypass logging into Plex with the latest version, so I dumped it and moved to Jellyfin which is fully open source. It does all I need, including having both Roku and Android apps, and supports DLNA so I can stream to various devices around the house. Don't miss Plex at all.
Samsung TVs are so horrible with spyware that it is best to keep them off the network and use an attached device like a Shield or Roku. This is also true with most other "smart TVs"
I understand the spyware part but one thing i noticed is that i dont get any ads which a lot of people I saw complaining about online. I think ads are location based and i'm outside their zone.
Been using Kodi since 2017. it‘s running on an nvidia shield with the files being supplied via NFS from a Synology nas. Currently not using an actual media server like emby.
It‘s been mostly rock solid. Kodi is more flexible in terms of interface. If you don‘t like plex‘s ui - tough luck.
I‘ve actually started using Plex for my highest-end Dolby Vision MKV‘s because Kodi didn‘t support playback yet. Might be different now.
Other than that I don‘t see massive differences tbh. Plex is certainly more of a „set it an forget it“ solution. Kodi is certainly a very good option, but if you have more than 1 user you might need some media server setup in addition (emby server, er even server side plex).
Edit: just updated on my shield. Does anyone know if Dolby Vision is supported now? Quickly tested it with a compatible movie - didn‘t work.
Edit 2: just looked it up. Apparently dual layer mkv is not supported yet. Guess I‘ll keep using Plex for this use case for now.
We use Emby Server to maintain watch status sync and various not-Kodi-friendly devices in our house. The TVs use Emby through Kodi because of Kodi's superior interface and processing.
Kodi 19/Matrix broke that, however, so now we're just streaming directly from the NAS until it's resolved on Emby's end.
While the 2 experiences are nearly identical, we like the per-user/other device stuff that Emby brings in. (As well as outside-the-home streaming when we travel.) If you don't need or care about that stuff, just pulling from a central data store works very nicely in stand-alone Kodi.
The Emby and Plex apps are trash compared to Kodi if you care about flexibility/customization.
I have a computer on my network that runs an nfs server and hosts media, then use kodi on nvidia shields (or other computers) to access it. It works extremely well... as in not even a single issue for years now. I should stress that this is at the level of just serving files, as I don't show any metadata associated with the media (as it's mainly personal home movies, etc).
How do you authenticate to the nfs server? Did you setup kerberos ?
I have always been reluctant to go that path, it felt to complex for my home use case. I generally use ftp instead for this reason, but I guess it's not as efficient.
I share my media on an Ubuntu server via NFS - all I've done is set the shared media library as read-only for the devices it's shared with, and specify the (local, reserved) IP it should be sent to. The only authentication is the fact that it's LAN-only, and being sent to the right (local) IP
Kerberos would be far too complex to be warranted here - all that's needed is nfs-kernel-server and /etc/exports on the server side.
Granted, my network is reasonably locked-down (MAC address filtering, (reserved) IP addresses available matching the number of devices on the network), but security beyond that has never really crossed my mind.
I don't password protect the media files on the nfs server - they are visible password-free from any machine on my local network. Of course if someone has sensitive material and/or the local network is shared, say, then some extra setup is needed.
EDIT: another common use-case for me is basically grabbing lots of youtube videos/playlists via youtube-dl, which then lets me watch them on anything and everything than can run kodi commercial-free without jumping through hoops (i.e. browser addons or sideloading third party youtube apps, etc)
I use both. Plex is better for the less technical members of my family. I burned all my wife’s Workout DVDs and she uses it with ease. For HDR movies I prefer Kodi. My understanding is that plex transcodes from the originating machine where as Kodi will transcode on the machine that receives it - so the HDR films get transcoded on a machine with a graphics card.
For some systems they come as simple apps you can just fire up, or you can have the separate apps load up. Not hard to switch between them.
Transcoding on the receiving end doesn’t make sense to me. If you’re trying to save bandwidth, transcoding on the receiving end is obviously pointless. If you’re transcoding just to play an unplayable codec, well, why not just get a better player that supports the codec? What am I missing?
I've been enjoying Kodi 18 "Leia" as both a NAS video client for the TV and as a game system emulator.
Multiplayer arcade games from the early nineties have been especially well received when we have company over... Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles work great as 2-3 player brawlers.
Raspberry Pi 3 is great for the sprite-based graphics but basically can't keep up with 3D graphics; no big deal though as long as you respect that limitation.
I'll keep an eye on Kodi 19 Matrix and see if I spot a compelling reason to update.
Yes.[0] You just need to share it from your main computer over whatever protocol you prefer, and add it to the Kodi library.
If you're talking about streaming from Kodi, both the official web interface and Yatse[1] support that. Yatse will even update the Kodi library metadata based on it.
That said, if streaming from Kodi is your primary use-case then Kodi is probably not a good fit. It doesn't really have a headless mode, and it'd be more efficient to just access the file share directly. Universal Media Server might be more up your alley then.[2]
Probably not, Kodi is designed more as a client. I think the classic setup is installing it on a HTPC or Raspberry Pi under the TV and it plays files either locally on it or from a NAS.
If you want to stream stuff checkout Jellyfin or Plex.
EDIT: To give more context since people are downvoting; yes you can theoretically stream from Kodi using various other apps, but it doesn't do any transcoding by default and isn't a strong choice. Quite frankly, I've also never gotten it to actually work but perhaps that's just me.
I have tried a few software, but I ended up using nginx with the directive "DirectoryIndex".
It allows you to browse a folder from you main computer with a browser, you click some media, streaming starts, nothing fancy. :)
Does anyone have a good overview of how the plug-in community is transitioning to Python 3 overall? I've only noticed one I regularly offer a new version ahead in anticipation of v19 and even that was fairly recently.
Kodi is a media center for playing whatever media you already have, even if it is your own rips or your own purchased downloads. Kodi was already a popular application for years before someone decided to sell prepackaged devices running Kodi that included a third-party pirate-streaming plugin.
I’ve used kodi since it was XBMC, “backups” was always its main focus, the amount of content available as a DRM free download is extremely limited and if we are realistic the amount of people that do their own rips form movies they own can probably fit in a movie theatre.
Kodi never went full on popcorn time but it’s pretty useless for anything but a large and quite likely pirated media collection.
You can have a DVD reader plugged to it and I also have a DVB-T adapter to watch TV. There are also emulators to play games nowadays (how legal that is most likely depends on the country you are in).
And how many people do you think use it as a DVB-T/DVD player?
I don’t understand really why is it so controversial to admit that Kodi’s sole existence is dependent on piracy as it provides a good UX to a large library of media files.
Same goes for Plex, everyone knows what it’s used for.
Sure there can be legitimate uses for this software but without the piracy angle we know that it wouldn’t be maintained or even really exist.
Kodi started as a homebrew media player for the Xbox to play additional media formats and files from sources other than the main DVD drive.
No idea, but at least I do use it for legal content. I believe it even works with some steaming DRM nowadays (even though I don't use that). No idea what others are doing, but I don't see why people would use kodi to see pirated content more than other video player/media center. A pirated video file should be readable everywhere.
Even if you don't use any plugins for streaming pirated content a lot of people use it as a player for downloaded torrents or streaming from seedboxes.
There's a surprising number of people who archive and read from NAS/server their physical media. I've always been tempted to believe it was nothing more than a cope-out to justify the existence of software that facilitates mass piracy (because I myself don't see the point of it for anything else than analog media), but it seems to be at least a very active niche.
I, for one, use it mostly with legal extensions to watch public videos and listen to internet radios, because I have an old TV without smart features, and it does the job well.
I use it too to "cast" Youtube videos to the TV (very easy to do with the "Kore" app (or "Send2Kodi" for iOS users)), as I don't want to use Chromecast.
I tried to use it to build a dynamic digital signage solution for the medical industry and it was a nightmare.
I persisted and wrote a plug-in that pulled data from a file that was updated with an API. I was impressed at first, but soon, the inconsistency of the experience on different platforms killed it for me.
Ultimately it was easier to run Android on an Odroid and use React Native to build an app.
I got the use-case all wrong though. A good use case is running Netflix on a Pi.
It's a nice interface for a media pc / diy dvr, and having searchable metadata is nice. I'd have it set up right now but they are terrible with plugin compatibility between versions, and the hacks various people have done to provide front-ends for legitimate streaming services are touch-and-go.
The blatant piracy angle does seem to be the bigger market at this point.
Yes. My wife and I have a strict "pay for what you consume" policy in this house.
I'm a former "industry" professional, so I have the utmost respect for people being compensated on whichever end they process/release material we prefer. (Usually Blu-ray, but sometimes digital if we can't find Blu-rays.) In fact, it's so important to us that we have only a handful of pre-owned movies/TV; all stuff we can't buy new.
Obviously it's a bit of a legal gray area to rip Blu-rays we purchased, but we don't do anything that would prevent content creators/platforms from receiving compensation. We don't format-shift (i.e. If we have a DVD, we don't obtain an HD version) and only rarely platform-shift (i.e. download a Blu-ray if we've only purchased the streaming rights) if that's the only option.
Legally shady but ethically sound stuff we do:
- torrent TV shows that we own the same-resolution discs for (it's faster than ripping/transcoding hundreds of hours of video)
- torrent TV/movies we've purchased effectively-lifetime licenses for (willing to remove if for a good ethical reason a platform revokes said license; hasn't happened yet though)
- pre-download Blu-rays we order if it'll take some time to get here
- torrent the very limited number of broadcast TV shows we record and strip ads from (this is probably the most questionable thing we do, ethically)
Far as music, most platforms at this point allow some form of non-DRM download, so we generally don't do anything unusual. We use several unauthorized plugins for our music streaming services, but do not download/keep anything we haven't purchased.
We absolutely do not "preview" stuff. If we want to "preview", we rent the movies and watch them there. If we choose to purchase, we may torrent, but generally just wait to rip.
No doubt we're in a minority, but Kodi is an invaluable way for us to consume our ethically-sourced content. (Even our children's friends seem to have ethics with this stuff, i.e. if they "gift" some MP3s to a peer, they'll also give them a gift card so they can purchase that content. Not sure how common it is, but I certainly don't remember doing this during the early days of CD ripping and Napster.)
I don't have a huge problem with some people fudging a little more than we do, but take great offense at people who use it simply for the pirating plugins.
I don't, for example, take much issue with people geo-shifting stuff they can't otherwise obtain. (The content creator is still in the same $0 profit situation their publisher put them in.) But stuff like Popcorn Time is really not cool for pretty much anyone except people who can't obtain the content for whatever reason.
Make of it what you will. But guns don't kill people; people kill people.
That's not legally shady, that is just plain illegal
Now personally I dont pay attention or care about copyright infringement. I commit plenty myself and gave done so for decades. I also pay plenty on services and such for content
I'll continue to commit copyright infring and purchasing media. But I am not going to pretend it's just legally shady, it's illegal, I know it and just don't care
Do you still watch your physical media? Your "pay for what you consume" policy jives with me but I will virtually never watch a physical Bluray.
I wish it was easier to buy DRM free digital media directly from the people who make it. I don't like the ewaste of buying something on a medium I never intend to use and I'd rather pay the creators directly instead of having every person in the physical goods chain take a cut of their profits.
We sure do! We've had server outages/maintenance, vacation travel with a self-imposed no-distracting-technology policy where we still wanted to do family movie nights, and of course as gifts. We also limit the children to our own library, but they do not have unfettered access at night, so if they want to watch something in their room to fall asleep to, they are allowed 1 or 2 discs at a time.
We've got philosophical/psychological issues with the unending smorgasbord of streaming services, so the children aren't allowed to use those alone for the most part. They have full access to our family library, but they often prefer the discs for some reason. (Our oldest has a DVD she watches frequently and refers to it as "retro".)
We've got external SSD drives with our favorites (since a few server-downtime left us wanting something more convenient—we keep most of our 3+ year old discs in a fireproof safe), but new stuff is often watched by the kids on disc.
And before you ask, no, the safe isn't "for the discs". It's just large enough to have plenty of room for them in CD cases, and that's a pretty reasonable backup in case of disaster. Not sure I understand why some of our friends happily show off $80,000 worth of Blu-rays or $100,000 worth of vinyl in their living rooms. I'd hate to have to recreate our collection, so why bother if we can easily protect it?
We do not torrent a lot. I was outlining the ways in which we "bend the rules" when we do. 90-95% of our digital collection is self-ripped.
And no, we do not seed or even upload. That can make it difficult to obtain stuff sometimes (bad/low reputation) but we'll hop proxies if we need to.
And before you ask, we don't feel bad about leeching. It's one thing if someone else wants to contribute to piracy, but I'm not willing to myself. This is a mode of convenience, not necessity. The likelihood that we would be contributing to someone with similar ethical principals is pretty low, so we're thankful to the folks that provide, but could take it or leave it.
Probably not, unless you create backups of Blu-ray movie you buy the legitimate use of Kodi and Plex is questionable, Plex at least offers streaming channels.
I’m still waiting for a decent service to centralize all available content amongst my streaming providers Apple TV seems to only work with Amazon Prime atm.
I would pay for a service that does this, bonus points if they can also tie in an automatic vpn to bypass goeblocks so you’ll have access to the entire library of a given provider regardless of your location.
I tried building one at some point but no provider offers a decent API to get that data and scraping them was too hard and Netflix makes it very hard to do.
It doesn't need to be, Apple is building that app. In fact, they already have it on there, the only notable holdout for the centralized progress/search functionality is Netflix. Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+ and Prime are there already.
I've gotta say, this was the most irresponsible Kodi release yet.
It's never been fun to upgrade Kodi (something inevitably breaks), but this is by far the worst upgrade of all. And now to find out that the automatically updated version that showed up on my Android TV is unmaintained..?! That takes the cake.
Even though Python 2 was set to EOL with 6 years warning (12 if you count the original timeline), Kodi didn't announce a change until last summer, I believe. So of course the vast majority of completely useful, basic utility plugins weren't updated, there was no enforced transitional upgrade path, and now we're stuck with an unmaintained Android version that contains this massive codebase change and 80% broken plugins.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for all the work the Kodi devs do. It's an immensely helpful program and by far the most used in my house. But this whole thing reeks of bad decisions.
There are no doubt going to be a significant number of issues found once plugins are upgraded (how can you tell the new system is stable enough for release when there are so exceedingly few plugins that work anymore?), and Android users are indefinitely in the dark as issues arise.
This version didn't have to be pushed out to Google Play, and knowing there was no maintainer makes such a choice hugely irresponsible. "We had to upgrade from Python 2.6 in case there are CVEs in the now defunct version!" makes sense. But now we have an unmaintained version in Android that broke everything, so if there are CVEs... guess who's not getting them? (Granted, it's sandboxed, so I'm not sure the concern makes a lot of sense on Android, but still.)
The Python 2/3 netsplit has been such a thorn for so long, so I can't entirely blame the Kodi devs. And it's not like a Kodi 18/19 netsplit would be a "good" idea. But this automatic, breaking change with no warning and no maintainer is seriously bad form.
"We're lucky we got the final Android 19 Matrix build out at all," is definitely not how I see it. "Lucky" would be Android users missing this very broken upgrade until they got all their ducks in a row and maybe more plugins are updated.
(And the whole, "well fix it/maintain it yourself," is a pretty poor response to bad project management in a project of this size, in case anyone is so inclined to suggest that. I maintain enough other OSS right now, thank you.)
After my Kodi 19 broke, I went searching for some discussion on the plugins I use. Pretty much every discussion I saw where the dev of the broken plugin acknowledged the transition did so during last summer.
Not sure if it was just coincidence, or if Kodi said, "look, y'all, we're moving forward! Get on it!"
That makes this release a little better. Still doesn't make releasing a known-unmaintained version on a platform more palatable, though.
They pushed out v19 on Android to ensure it wasn't the best version. 18.9 unmaintained is better than 19 on the other platforms, which is sad. I run Kodi on a FireTV Cube and it looks like I won't be updating from 18.9 for a very long time.
It'd be interesting to know if the folks who worked on Android walked off stage (to use your words) due to the additional fuss with the Python 3 switch.
This whole thing is really yet-another fault of Python 3, heck of a legacy. Probably the worst and least advantageous break, in one of the more popular programming languages, ever. You could blame the maintainers for embracing it. I'm not a Python expert, but there is no good answer other than stop supporting programming languages with poor backwards compatibility. An option may have been something like a transitional measure in the system that addons import Python-Future or they won't work, and after a year or two of that, release a version of Kodi that is Python 3 only.
I wonder how hard it is to move a big codebase like this off of python to a language where programs have a longer half life.
Alternatively, has anyone considered creating an LTS python version? Back in the old days, debian’s perl maintainers effectively did this for a subset of cpan, and it worked well.
Both Lua and Ruby—very embeddable scripting languages—have had excellent track records of forwards compatibility. (Usually requiring extremely simple changes if that.)
Python went the way of Perl 5/6 (though to a much lesser extent) with their upgrade and broke several fundamental language features.
To this day, I still don't understand the aesthetic reason people seem to prefer Python over something like Ruby. I get all the institutional reasons (Python was adopted by academia), and I get the performance reasons (Python used to be much faster), but with the exception of scientific stuff, the library support is pretty darn identical between the two languages.
And, at least among the few people I taught Ruby to that had previous Python experience, every single one said, "oh, this is a lot easier to understand/use."
Obviously, opinions are like... well. But my very humble opinion of Python is that its reputation is undeserved, is not as intuitive as a pseudocode language as Ruby is, and frankly I think the really painful, protracted transition from Python 2.6 to 3 is more a product of people who really only understand 1 programming language not wanting to change. (I see it as the modern BASIC.)
But I'm not here to start a flame war. Just saying there are other reasonable languages that are easy to learn and much more stable than Python's 2/3 transition.
Many people have Android TV on their TVs, or boxes like Nvidia Shield.
While a Raspberry Pi is a pretty simple way to get Linux/Kodi on the TV, getting it to integrate well is a whole other story. (Remotes, CEC, other services like Netflix, etc.)
I'm your typical Linux hacker of 20 years, but even I switched from Raspberry Pi to Nvidia Shield a couple years ago because the pain of using and maintaining it is so much lower for an interface that should be as simple as "pick and play".
Funny you should mention that. CEC integration is much better on the Pi than on the shield IME. Kodi can't detect other CEC devices and allow to configure its behaviour on the shield (like pause video when switching channels on the TV, control what to do when sleeping, etc).
Likewise with remotes, they work as well, if not better, on the Pi (you can even solder an IR receiver or emitter if you want).
Of course, Netflix is another story, but that's because of DRM, and I decided long ago I wouldn't use any service with DRM.
For me, I use a Shield because of the technicals. It‘s currently the most complete solution if you want dolby vision/atmos capable playback with local stuff (plex/kodi) and streaming services. The shield pro 2019 is also the only box that manages to play 100gb+ 4K stuff without issues. Most people don‘t care about that though.
I run it on an Android TV. I'm thinking of plugging small device running Linux though, like a raspberry pi because my tv (a sony from 2015) is not maintained anymore as the last update introduced a huge amount of bugs (the tv can't play a lot of h264 videos, h263 videos doesn't work at all).
This is why my next TV will just be a 43" monitor, not anything "smart". After all that's how I am using my current TV set, which does not even have a DVB tuner. Since modern TVs are effectively computers that are controlled with a remote control, I might as well use a real computer and manage myself the software that it runs.
Cause there are hundreds of cheap android TV boxes one can buy which don't run Linux. Also kodi for android runs on amazon's fire sticks and Googles new chromecast (the Google tv one)
