Is Kodi worth giving a shot again, my last use being around 2016?
Whenever I tried it out, I found it laggy and buggy. Has it improved?
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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Immensely. Its extremely versatile and robust at this point.
If youre just using it as a media center computer go with libreelec, which is an OS that boots directly into kodi. The intergration is deep and excellent.
Xbian is like this too, for Raspberry Pi SBC’s. Kodi keeps getting faster, smoother, more stable, better…all the good things. And it’s brilliant if you still have a non-smart tv and are inclined to sail the open seas flying a Jolly Roger.
It's really fantastic on SHIELD pro for playing stuff from a NAS. This newest release finally has full Dolby vision support.
What source are you using when playing Dolby Vision, does it work with Jellyfin/Jellycon?
Just playing files via NFS storage. I haven't ever tried Jellyfin so I'm not sure.
Is the hardware support for Raspberry Pi still out of tree or can I use an upstream build now on my Pi 4?
The rpi4 is working like shit for me atm. Same for you? I used nightly and still twitch and youtube are not working. I even took half an hour to make an api access for youtube to no avail so far. Peertube isnt being updated afaik and I‘m pretty much devastated atm. Twitch freezes the whole system on midroll ads.
It works well enough with the rasbian OS derived from Debian. However pure Debian currently doesn't have all the user space components to take advantage of the video decoder needed to play things smoothly. Currently I have Bookworm installed on the system but I run Kodi out of a docker image: https://github.com/stsquad/dockerfiles/blob/master/distros/raspios-bullseye/Dockerfile
Oh… i should clarify that I‘m using libreelec since the pi is on my tv. I can use it with my ir remote which is nice or with the phone app but twitch freezes the whole system.
Xbian on my 4Gb Pi4 running the 64bit bookworm is wonderful.
Is it plug and play as well or do you have to configure it to run with tv remote control?
Iirc for the tv remote to work all you need to do is make sure your CEC options are correct in settings. I use an app on my phone - easier to type searches in.
Yeah. Its the same on libreelec. Thanks for elaborating.
Most welcome. Sorry it took me so long
Dont worry. Thanks for taking the time and coming back to it. :)
Ahh...i almost forgot that Kodi still exist, i remembered using Kodi when it still XBMC and ohh man that was absolutely great
Nowadays there's too many multimedia apps, even i still confused what the difference between Jellyfin, Kodi, Plex, & Stremio
Kodi: A standalone multimedia player, it plays contents stored locally or on the network (SMB, NFS)
Plex/Jellyfin: Multimedia server, it shares local content over network/internet to multiple users.
Stremio: Plays content from online sources (torrent, HTTP)
For good measure, let's also mention Kodi's support for 3rd-party add-ons, such as various legitimate (e.g. national broadcasters) VoD services, pirate streams scrapers, live TV (e.g. IPTV or TVHeadend), as well as e.g. Jellyfin/Jellycon. And that's not even all!
I tried to keep things simple, however I use Kodi mainly with PlexMod addon.
Plex official apps have many issues with audio and subtitles, Kodi plays (almost) everything and better options for audio/subtitles
Plex and jellyfin can host your files on your network.
Plex and kodi can play the media on your devices.
How does Kodi compare to Plex? Are there any features it has similar or different?
Kodi doesn't have a server feature like plex does where you can serve media to other devices. A more direct alternative would be jellyfin, which even works well with kodi as the media player.
What does Kodi do, then, if you can't host your media on it?
It's a media center, you can play your local files or you can use add-ons like the official jellyfin addon and connect to any jellyfin server.
IIRC didn't it start out as XBMC, a media center you put onto the original Xbox?
It sure did, its over 20 years old now.
I guess it has inspired much of its competition, some of which with have added broader scope (like media servers) as one of their distinguishing features.
It basically does the same thing that VLC does, but with a controller optimized interface.
Media can be loaded from a ton of places. Samba share, dvb card, streaming services, ...
Controller optimized, and yet they still can't make the d-pad send the correct number of button presses. There is like a 1 in 20 chance it receives 2 presses instead of one.
Kodi, especially with librelec on rpi can be used as a replacement for appletv or firestick. But atm its rough for me, ngl.
How does Kodi compare to Jellyfin?
I use Android TV and Chrome on macOS as my primary clients, and Arch on my server with an Nvidia 1080Ti for transcoding.
If you're comparing the official jellyfin client apps to kodi, then kodi looks much nicer with more features but requires better hardware. It should work on on your Mac fine but depending on what android tv specs you have it may be a bit slower than the jellyfin client.