I love Kodi, it runs my house for watching movies, listening to my mp3 collection or internet radios, and does it great. However what I'm really missing is a way to stream everything in and out:
- allow streaming audio to other computers for multi-room audio
- allow streaming audio from phones or computers when I throw a party at home and people want to play DJ
- allow streaming audio+video from a computer to use my big screen from a laptop without plugging wires
Of course there are some plugins that do a part of that, but they're hard to configure and break often (when they work); I'd really like that to work as simply and reliably as the media playing works now
If you enable "AirPlay" on Kodi it just works with Apple devices, in my experience. I'm not sure why there isn't something that easy for Android, but I suspect it's Google being evil and wanting you to buy one of their devices. Conceptually it's trivial with Pulseaudio to stream over the network. I ended up getting a bluetooth receiver for mine which allowed me to play from any phone (you do need to do a little bit of Pulseaudio config on the Kodi device, though).
Yes I tried via PulseAudio but it didn't work very well, and as it doesn't go through Kodi you can't see what's playing currently.
As for AirPlay, I only have android phones so I can't test it.
- 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