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.
>> 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.
It does sound like you've had slightly-more-than-average bad luck (I had some similar problems occasionally when I had Kodi on an RPi3, but it's been flawless for a year or so after I upgraded to RPi4), but you're certainly not wrong!
One point to consider, though, is that most TVs don't have built-in file managers (or, indeed, NAS-connection capability) - for folks who prefer to watch their media on a big screen, you need some client that can a) connect to your storage location, and b) play it out over HDMI etc. For me, Kodi is the best-functioning of those options.
If you're content with watching on a laptop/PC screen (or if your PC has your TV as an AV-out), however, then you're golden and there's nothing that Kodi really does over-and-above to make it worthwhile.
EDIT: Ah, I see[1] you do indeed have a PC connected to your TV. In which case - yeah, there's no reason not to do what you're doing!
The issue with Kodi is, in my opinion, the same as with setting up a mame cab for playing roms : Perpetual Work In Progress. Users are spending way more time configuring, optimizing, and eventually breaking the whole thing than actually enjoying it.
On my side, i'm playing my content with my AppleTV through a Plex server on a Nas, using wired network, and I couldn't be happier. Using a professionnal, closed, solution, sometimes make things better.
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.
I honestly can't keep track anymore. I've used plex for a number of years and it's "fine" but they keep spending time developing things I don't want and ignoring things the community would like in an effort to "go commercial" and "legitimatize".
I want a media center that can do these things:
- access from phone or tablet: remote is nice to have, but on my own network is a must
- can chromecast everything
- can scrape metadata reliably (I don't mind fixing a few things here and there)
- supports movies, tv shows, random videos
- automatic subtitle downloading
- supports music formats, podcasts, and audio books and understands they are different things, and can grab them as needed
- supports not only mp3s, oggs, etc. for music, but supports stuff their underlying media libraries already support like amiga mod, chiptune formats etc. (a major gripe of mine with plex). right now I need to convert to mp3 for this need, but the media libraries plex uses already supports these formats, it's just the damn gui and library indexing bits don't
- support for photo libraries
- ebooks, pdfs, cbz, cbr, etc. (I need extra apps for this)
- emulator support would be a super sweet stretch goal
- has smart tv apps would be also great, but chromecast support is fine
Does Kodi, emby, jellyfin, whatever support all this?
Putting it in a list makes it's pretty clear how much people are expecting from these "media theater" servers, yet it's kind of depressing to get backslash from wanting to "go commercial".
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.
Is this sarcasm? I don't mean any disrespect or negativity, I just don't understand. I'm not familiar with this space, but I don't see why the aforementioned expectations are unrealistic. The only issue I can imagine is big media companies strong arming a player in this space (which I assume is what happens to existing companies mentioned). There's nothing technically impossible mentioned.
I have to agree. Most of this can already be done by something like JellyFin. But once you start branching into understanding podcast, emulators, comicbooks, & personal photos, you're no longer talking about a single app.
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.
On the other hand, there are open source options for most of this stuff. Jellyfin probably gets you about half of the list, and you can set up dedicated software for much of the rest with a little effort.
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.
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.
Goddamn that list escalated from “that makes sense” to “homers car from the Simpsons” quickly. I
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.
Auto subtitle downloads? Come now if you are only watching rips of your own legally purchased media the subs would be available to you already… unless you aren’t.
I use jellyfin myself but it is so incredibly slow that often it is basically non-functional. It seems that usually when I first open it after a while it is fast enough but then it rapidly slows to a crawl where it sometimes can't even start the next episode in a series. I'm not running it on fantastic hardware but it should me more than sufficient for this task, other services on the box are snappy. I would happily replace it if I could find an alternative.
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.
My requirements towards one solution is almost the same as yours. I've tried for a (relative) long time with jellyfin since I don't like the half-assed selfhosted/commercial approach from plex.
I think jellyfin works great for:
* 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 used plex for a number of years and it's "fine" but they keep spending time developing things I don't want and ignoring things the community would like
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.
I've found Plex to be decently capable for all the things I want EXCEPT ONE.
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?
> 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.
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.
The reason for the file naming convention is for metadata matching. All they are really doing behind the scenes is searching the movie name (and possibly year) from a metadata provider. The files you obtain online or rip yourself themselves rarely have any metadata in the file so the only remaining option is to parse the filename/directory structure.
I was most disappointed when they got rid of the cloud sync and things. Servers should sync between each other easily, but they don't. And the plex channels are mostly worthless, the entire point of plex is for people to bring their own content.
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".
Just buy a google chromecast with google tv and install VLC on it.
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.
I've actually put Kodi on my Chromecast with Google TV. Put the things my parents watch on the favorites and remove all the other menu items and they can use it fine.
I remember seeing a few open source projects like that, but the issue was Chromecast requires DRM for apps like Netflix. Some like Plex and YouTube would work fine.
Maybe you could run it through a capture card and pipe that to whatever, but it's a lot more expensive.
Kodi is the perfect example of how amateurs (in the good sense of the word) can make something long-lasting and provide an alternative that is better than whatever the "industry" wants to shove down our throats.
A lot of companies have a conflict of interest between making the best software and prioritizing synergy with another division. Sony Electronics added DRM to their formats to help Columbia Pictures.
I tried a bunch of things on the N2+, but I kept having to install Kodi on whatever I was running and ultimately settled on CoreELEC to keep the things simple and running.
For HTPC there is really no good competing ecosystem
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.
They work very well together. There are two different Kodi plugins that make Kodi into a Jellyfin player.
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.
Interesting - I bought Emby this year for serving local media - my one gripe is no thumbnails/preview when you scrub over the timeline - this one has it. Will give it a spin.
I have found that after trying a bunch of different setups during the years. Kodi, Plex, etc. I have settled on using: Sonarr[0], Radarr[1] and Lidarr[2]; combined with Jacket[3] and your favorite torrent downloader (I use Deluge). Add the TV Series you follow or movies you want to watch.
This setup downloads everything for me once a movie or episode becomes available to download, and then I only watch content that is already downloaded using VLC. This is pretty good specially if your Internet connection is a bit spotty at times.
I've been using this setup for years now, and I'm pretty happy with it.
I run LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi, which is a just-enough-OS for Kodi. It works great, and is even a good choice for playing music over HDMI, because unlike some other music-playing distributions, it doesn't use ALSA, and simply bit-bangs the decoded audio out of the HDMI port. Works very well.
Indeed. It's also worth mentioning that the very inexpensive Digital TV tuner "just works" (at least in Europe) and with tvheadend you can then stream the live stream around your home network trivially. That's what the rpi4 running Kodi in our bedroom does at least. The streams are so in sync that you can listen to them on two separate devices in other bits of the house without an audio phase difference.
Kodi is an amazing project and deserves much praise.
I really want to like LibreElec, but the frequent crashes of the entire OS makes it hard for me to do so. A day doesn't go by that the entire system crashes on me. Connecting a bluetooth device? 50/50 chance that it crashes. Attempting to play a video that failed to play just before? Complete crash.
Sounds like a hardware problem. Libreelec has been running on my Pi2 for literally years. The only time I had problems was when the power supply of my Pi failed. If you're running a Pi, try changing the PSU. Bad power can cause many problems that you wouldn't expect.
+1 for LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi. Zero hassle, zero fiddling, everything just works, and it feels like it's built into the TV as it uses its IR remote as the only input device.
I got an old PC my job was dumping(Haswell, I think), installed kodi, and put it under the TV. Then copied all our DVDs on the hard disk. Use the android app as remote.
It works flawlessly. The startup time is a bit slow, but once running, my 4 year old kid can choose his bed time series and watch 1 or 2 episodes on his own. My wife also knows her way around.
Now there are tons of unused options in there, but who cares. But I never had to mess around with the settings like the other poster experiences, it just works.
Only problem is I can't manage to play from the Nickelodeon website, but maybe a bit of googling might unearth a webbrowser plugin.
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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].
[0] https://libreelec.tv/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenELEC
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!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634830
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].
[1]: https://madvrenvy.com/
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”...
[0]https://airflow.app/
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?
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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- 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.
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.
[0] https://jellyfin.org/
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.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-kodi
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellycon
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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.