Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by chromas on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the bans dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:57AM (#721306)

    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.

    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.)