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A Dutch-based developer and Kodi addon repository administrator has shut down his operation following threats from anti-piracy outfit BREIN. Due to the XvBMC-NL repo offering addons including Covenant and IPTV Bonanza, BREIN accused its operator of facilitating access to infringing content. He is now required to sign an abstention agreement and pay a settlement of 2,500 euros.
As the battle to prevent unauthorized content getting into the hands of the masses continues, Kodi remains one of the leading platforms for such consumption.
Completely legal as it leaves its official download platform, the Kodi software is easily modified to provide access to pirated movies, TV shows, and live sports. From here on in, usage of such a setup to infringe copyright is illegal in Europe.
With this established, anti-piracy outfit BREIN has been attempting to stem the tide of platforms offering 'pirate' addons in the Netherlands. One of those was XvBMC-NL, a repository which contained addons including the hugely popular Covenant and live TV addon IPTV Bonanza.
According to a report by BREIN, last month the Dutch developer and administrator of XvBMC-NL received an unwelcome visit to his home by bailiffs sent by the anti-piracy group. BREIN hasn't made the precise contents of its message to 'Z' known but it's clear that it views his work as illegal and contrary to copyright law. The developer shut down soon after.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:23AM (8 children)
No, you don't.
What were you using? Confluence (kodi=17)?
Main menu>Videos>Add source>Done.
Only if additionally you also want metadata and pretty posters added to your library, then scan your collection with the official addons available in the official kodi repo, a few clicks away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:35AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:37AM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Funny) by janrinok on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:59AM
Gosh, it is more complicated than I thought - its taken 3 posts to just identify the versions of software. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:57AM
I'm not really a big video/film fan, but for the occasional binges I have/had one of those Kodi Android boxes connected to my TV, mostly to play local content. It came with an 'optimised' version of Kodi 15.2 which, to be fair, worked reasonably well out of the box for both my local files and some of the streaming services, but once I tried updating the thing...an attempt to put 17.6 on it screwed the box up so much I was forced to do a factory reset, even after that it seemed still to be slightly borked, got pissed off with this, so press-ganged an underused Phenom 9850 Linux box into performing this service short-term.
One clean Kodi (17.6) install (no pyratical plugins) on the Phenom later, pointed it to the NFS shares of my NAS and let it chunter away as I went and did something else for a couple of hours.
Image my surprise when I got back to checking on its progress and I discovered, thanks to it doing what the programmers apparently think is some clever matching of file checksums or something against teh internetz, I had f.tons of videos I'd never heard of before in my library, and as for what it did to my music collection....how the fuck can it decide to override the id3 data of a file? 'Nah, sorry pal, 'Court of the Crimson King' says your id3 tag, some fucking kpop band says I' Just as well the shares are 'read-only' on that machine.
I want to like Kodi, but I'm not impressed. Sure, there's probably some damn configuration options I've missed somewhere in its 'apparently-cool-looking-but-thrown-together-by-a-committee-of-Golgafrinchams-in-a-style-over-function-manner' user interface and I now understand how and why there are people out there who seem to be making a bit of money on the side by configuring Kodi boxes, but me? I'll think I'll be sticking to DeaDBeeF for music and vlc/mplayer for the videos that I've already transferred to the NAS or will download (streaming I can live without), not as resource hungry and their playlist loaders don't fuck things up.
(Btw the Phenom is serious overkill and will be (hopefully) replaced with a thin client running Linux at the end of the month.)
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:10PM (3 children)
Falls under the category "non-obvious thing X", that I mentioned. You need to know what a source is, and that it can be a local folder. In addition, if your file is not in one of the specified folders, you are out of luck. You can't just open the file. You have to add its folder as a source, even if playing the file is a one-off thing. I guess having a File>Open option was considered too much of a "legacy" approach to the Kodi developers.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Osamabobama on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:53PM
It might be easier to keep a shelf of DVDs near your television. You could sort them in whatever order you want. When you get a DVD that isn't on your shelf already, you can just pop it into your DVD player directly. No Kodi required!
To do the same thing with Kodi, you'd have to rip the DVDs to various files, sort out the worthless extras, name each file in a format that Kodi will recognize, put it in a location that Kodi can find it, and let Kodi pull the metadata from the internet and build an index of all the videos. But then you can move all those DVDs to the basement and never touch them again.
Netflix is even easier, but I will leave that process out...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:58PM (1 child)
It is literally the FIRST thing it makes you do when you clean install it and click videos. Now if you just start clicking around and ignore the warnings and popups telling you exactly what to do...
You can also go video->files. It is right on the menu...
If you can not figure that out then yeah you need to use something else. I can suggest VLC.
You have to add its folder as a source, even if playing the file is a one-off thing.
You can add a generic folder to drop things into. You can set it to auto update or manual.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Wednesday August 15 2018, @08:08AM
The first thing it wants me to do is to notice that my library is empty (I don't want a library, I want to see how this program works as a media player, to see if I want to bother with it) and to have me choose a source, which, being a beginner, I have no idea what it is. Kodi assumes that I want to use it so much, that I'll put up with its quirkiness, and that I am already proficient in its terminology and way of doing things. At this early stage, both assumptions are wrong.
Video>Files does not open files, only folders. It allows you to specify a folder as a video source, which you need to add to your video sources, after which, you can browse said folder. Adding your home folder as a source, then browsing said source, yes, you can sort of have the equivalent of File>Open, but in a complicated, round-about way. However, being a beginner trying to figure out how to open a file, and seeing that Video>Open does not open files, one is more likely to think that one is simply looking at the wrong place. Meanwhile, VLC has "Media>Open File", not to mention Media>Open all sorts of other things.