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

Nick Rout nick.rout at gmail.com
Wed May 20 23:42:39 UTC 2015


On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 6:17 AM, Phill Edwards <philledwards at gmail.com> 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 am a kodi convert and have read through most of this thread. I think
this is the appropriate message to reply to to get my answer in
context.

Pluses about kodi:

The addon system, (relatively) easily written and understood in python

The great metadata handling - this is what first turned me to xbmc as a trial.

The plethora of beautiful and functional skins

PVR works against a wide range of backends

3D support in the gui

Wide range of hardware and OS support

Great subtitle support. Watching something without subs and realise
you need subs? A couple of button clicks and they are downloaded and
enabled.

An example of a number of these advantages converging is that you can
make a functional PVR backend and frontend combined out of a raspberry
pi and a USB tuner or HRHR using tvheadend as a backend. Try that with
mythtv!

Minuses;

The plethora of addons have led to XBMC being tarred with the "piracy"
tag. The XBMC foundation, which owns the kodi trademark, has strict
anti-piracy policies, but it hasn't entirely been able to stop the
many "buy a fully loaded android kodi/xbmc box and watch anything you
like for free" marketeers.

PVR UI isn't up to mythFE's, especially for setting up complex
recording rules. Don't give up your mythweb!

Comm skip doesn't work as well as mythFE

Doesn't run a centralised database by default (although easy to set up).


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