[mythtv-users] What's the deal with Kodi?

[Andrew Leech]

On 21/05/2015 4:17 AM, Phill Edwards wrote:
>
> > I'm really surprised to hear so many of you moving over to Kodi as a 
> front end. Am I right in thinking that Kodi is based on (or 'is') 
> XBMC? I have tried XMBC roughly once every year or two since it came 
> out as I feel I must be 'missing something'. Every time I try it, I 
> uninstall it after a couple of days. I find it repeatedly horrible to 
> set up, sluggish and ugly (compared to the best Myth themes) and I 
> just don't see any benefits. I think MythTV with one of the nice 
> themes (like the most recent Steppes), is SO much better.
> >
> > What am I missing? What is it about XBMC/Kodi that people like and 
> even prefer?
> >
>
> I don't think you're missing anything. Kodi is a great product but 
> when it comes to recording and watching your TV recordings I agree 
> that mythfrontend is far better.
>
I feel mythfrontend does the tv guide better, commflag handling if 
you're one of the lucky ones for whom comflagging works (I'm not, and 
I've tried many times), and sticky keys during playback. That's about it 
these days.
And it's far too heavy on resources.
I don't mean to be disparaging to the developers in any way, I've 
contributed myself in the past, but kodi really has the momentum and 
critical mass to bring more and more developers onboard.

Kodi has far more advanced music & video library handling, filtering, 
viewing and playing.
Thumbnails and metadata always seem to just work. I know lots of work's 
been done on this in recent years on myth, but I always had a highly 
manual process (~ 10% of videos at least) to get meta and thumbs to show 
the right show.
Streaming from airplay sometimes works on kodi, it never works (for me) 
on myth.

I have a serious pet hate of switching devices/interfaces, that was the 
driving reason for me to set up a myth box 10+ years ago - I wanted one 
device, one remote, that did everything.
For a while myth's playback was getting skippy and choppy, on new i3 
hardware. I couldn't abide by that,  so ran both kodi and mythfrontend 
for a while and switched between them, but as soon as I made a theme 
that more closely matched the myth ui layout my significant other was 
used to, I switched to kodi permanently.
Sure the guide is still a bit more clunky, but I use mythweb to get 
around that. And we watch more content from streaming services these 
days anyway (abc iview, sbs, netflix, hulu, ted) and I could never get 
these working on myth - but the kodi plugins work (even if i've had to 
fix a few of them).

And very importantly (for me), the plugins are written in python. You 
don't need the kodi source the compile against, anyone can just hack up 
a bit of python and run it directly in kodi. This makes it infinitely 
easier to get less experienced developers involved, and much quicker for 
experienced people to make complex plugins. I can make changes to a 
plugin with my laptop over a shared drive to my lounge pc, running live 
on the tv, and see the changes instantly. There's no 
compile,deploy,restart, it's all instant update.