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

[Nick Rout]

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Andrew Leech <coronasensei at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.


Absolutely! I have hacked a few of the simpler addons (like the great one
that switches my Philips Hue lights off when playback starts, and a couple
of the other home automation ones).
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