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.
It wouldn't be HN if I didn't learn something new! I knew it only as XBMC. Even bought that damn IR plug and a remote for xbox. I played only a handful of games on it, but XBMC was in constant use.
> It was a revelation in that the UI was amazing for the time, and the hardware was good enough to decode everything available.
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.
I was a heavy IRC user, and that does sound familiar, so that's very likely, but I don't really remember. It might as well have been from sourceforge or the (then) newly released Bittorrent.
>> Only thing I don't like about it is that Netflix isn't on it.. but that's hardly Kodi's fault.
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.
> 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.
This is a similar approach to when i used it long ago when it was xmbc. My media is well organised on my file system so I'd point xmbc at a smb share and navigate from there.
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.
Kodi is very flexible and you can make the menus behave just like you want. Setting it up can take a bit of fooling around to figure out but it's quite straight-forward once it clicks.
I googled a bit and yes, there does seem to be a way to configure a top-level file browser with super favourites add-on. For sorting, I see nothing appropriate, though.
So, yes, Kodi is flexible, but too tricky for leisure 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!
True, but irrelevant to the conversation at hand. And also ironic, given that most HNers decry smart TVs and yearn for a return to "just a screen", without apps (including file managers).
You're missing it entirely. They want "just a screen" precisely so that they can use whatever they want on it, including filemanagers if they wish.
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.
I'm not sure how we're managing to agree so much on overall direction/motivation, while seeming to contradict one another.
> 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.
One of mine does, but it only handles MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio...kinda useless when your videos are all H.264 with a variety of audio codecs.
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.
VLC can be installed on most smart tvs and has excellent DLNA support. I still use plex but have DLNA as a backup when the internet goes out (better local network connectivity)
I've found OSMC to be great, even on RPi2. I tried LibreELEC recently and couldn't get live TV to work acceptably with a USB TV tuner (glitchy). I ended up somewhat going down a rabbit hole of USB isochronous/asynchronous/buffering settings but just went back to OSMC.
You can also use apt to customize OSMC because it's based on Debian[1].
The maintainer, Sam Nazarko seems really helpful too.
LibreELEC, off the top of my head - though (ironically, given the conversation being about the constant need for tinkering and fixing in solutions that should be robust) I'm away from my home right now, and my VPN is down so I can't ssh in to check :P
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.
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.)
> Users are spending way more time configuring, optimizing, and eventually breaking the whole thing than actually enjoying it.
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.
That more sounds like a you problem. No reason to play around with your setup, if you don't want to. Just hook it up to a NAS and play your files, has been working fine here for +7 years
Who says thats not the part i love about my mame always something to do, and no Ive had both setups and kodi and plex suffer from the same config mess.
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.
Same here, I've been using PotPlayer with MadVR for years on Windows. HDR, resolution and framerate matching worked beautifully, long before Windows had proper support for HDR. Even now, some HDR content just looks wrong in other media players.
MadVR know their stuff, they recently announced a very expensive home theatre video processor [1].
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 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?)
I used to have a laptop connected to my TV that I controlled with a small wireless keyboard. It wasn't VLC but MPC, but mostly the same as you're doing.
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.
> ... 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.
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".
This is fair, but I've found that I want to watch my content on a television instead of my computer monitor, since I already have everything set up. Unfortunately, it seems that there aren't many good options for just playing files on the network natively using Android TV alone.
It seems that a lot of people reach for Plex or similar in this situation, but setting up Plex requires a separate computer to serve the files. If all you want to do is play videos on your local network, then Kodi might be a suitable option, since it can run directly on hardware like smart TVs without the need to set up a separate computer.
Ah, I see. I have a PC hooked up to my TV, which I use for the purposes mentioned in my post. I (perhaps erroneously) took it for granted that most people using these programs were doing the same.
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 beamer instead of a tv but it is not complicated to dedicate a small computer like a gigayte brix or an old laptop and use the tv/beamer as the screen. Be it with kodi or using regular apps doesn't make a huge difference these days. With the advent of hidpi monitors, all modern OSes support scaling the icons/text/widgets so it is perfectly viewable from a few meters of distance.
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.
I recommend using an HDMI cable. The inconvenience of threading a cable across the room is massively outweighed by the convenience of never having to deal with network issues, limited bandwidth, or introducing additional software issues you didn't already have before.
I am either old school or lazy; I just cannot bother with learning a new system and maintaining it all.the.time. So yes, PC is my hammer, and I just double click on what I want to watch. Ir just works.
(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 )
> 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 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.
Totally agree. All I want is "here my files, let me pick one". And KODI make me to choose genres, directors, stars, movie length, all this stuff. Need to do many clicks just to browse directory/dlna. And it's laggy.
All of that is strictly optional; you can browse in a local or remote folder and use it just like a traditional video player+file browser in that sense.
I played with kodi for a week or two then went back to vlc and shell scripts.
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".
Similarly, I spent ~£2000 on having a wonderful home cinema setup (meticulously organised kodi library on a dedicated HTPC, surround-sound, projector) -- but it’s mostly collecting dust because chromecast’ing netflix from my phone to the TV is so much more convenient.
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”...
Thats why I switched to plex. Being able to chromecast makes it possible to use any of my tv's not just the one that had the pc connected. I now run chromecast's only and a plex server.
I'm in a similar boat. I don't want a media center, I just want to be able to easily stream video from my PC with the highest picture quality (no unnecessary transcoding). Luckily I found an app[0] that does just that and does it well. Paid, but you can see the quality (only recurring issue is that the remote control app keeps disconnecting from my PC after a while).
Kodi is indeed overkill I find. As some have mentioned, point it to SMB share and be done. uPnP/DLNA sucks.
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.
Using Kodi in my tv box and setup SMB to a shared folder on my Windows laptop. It was an easy setup and pretty frictionless later. I usually still use VLC to get the subtitles upfront saved with the same filename as the video file.
Whatever I get in my laptop I can see in the TV later.
Chromecast is also an option, not sure if there's some quality loss in that case.
I don't even use a GUI. I use mpv with a wireless keyboard. There have been weird multichannel codec passthrough issues no matter what player I am using, like ... if the 5.1 signal says 'side left' then nothing comes out of my 5.1 system 'rear left'. WTF... but once they are fixed, they are fixed forever in a profile.
This is exactly my experience as well. Just hook up a PC/RPI to a TV via HDMI with a wireless keyboard-mouse combo. Install VLC and a web browser, auto-mount an optional NFS/SAMBA share and... done. This covers 95 percent of my use cases for myself and non-technical users.
Agreed. (but I use sshfs+userify with an automount for sshfs) And VLC, so no more fighting to set up HDMI audio. I would love to know how to set up Dolby Atmos, though, but VLC has some great configuration options for various pass-thru.
if im on my laptop and i know what i want to watch ill use the file manager since its definitely a lot quicker, otherwise i usually open up jellyfin because so i can get a synopsis of the movie and see the ratings.
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
Jellyfin on a plain OS is a good choice. I do it on a TV for friends and family (with a browser set for fullscreen). The Jellyfin app enables much control via other connected devices. People like it, and maintenance is ok (1 day per year, more if I want to add content more often).
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).
I quite like the convenience with the Kore remote for Android, great for my home cinema setup. But unfortunately updated packages on Ubuntu since moving, and now audio doesn't work. I really hate Linux audio, what a mess >_<
I use Kodi on my computer with Tiny Media Manager, and loving it so far. Yes, it's not a TV on a living room setup, but being able to browse what I have with good metadata is a much better experience for me, so far.
Similar ending for me as well. There were quite often issues with plugins and I ended up sshing in the machine via phone and starting the movies/series that way.
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?