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: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:32AM (7 children)
Cut the cable in May, now have Plex + Roku + pi 3B+ + a NAS I bought a few years ago.
I was smart enough (second time around) to buy the 32G SDCard. Now I have room to install Kodi, and thinking I should just Gir-r-done, learn what I can, before $PowersThatBe somehow shut it down.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:46AM
Libreelec is probably the way to go. They have an image for several processor types, including Raspberry Pi.
Frankly, if you are capable of following onscreen prompts you're going to be able to set it up no problem.
From what I understand some of the streaming plugins stop working after a while, but I actually use it for legal streaming, as the service I watch I pay for.
(At least I think it's legal. Who the hell knows with content owners. I have never read the terms of use and don't intend to).
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:53AM (4 children)
This could be a good place to start:
https://troypoint.com/how-to-install-exodus-on-kodi/ [troypoint.com]
That will get you Exodus, likely the most popular and useful addon, and a repo containing other addons.
I'm not using the platform right now so I don't have any up-to-date advice or addon recommendations other than that.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:48AM (1 child)
To ask the obvious question, is there somewhere I can compare Kodi to Libreelec to Exodus? Or do I have to install all of them to see what they do?
And how are they better/different from Plex?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:17AM
Kodi is what you install first. Addons like Exodus go on top of Kodi, as shown in the guide I linked. Another way to find some Kodi addons is to use Git Browser [tvaddons.co] from TVaddons.co. You search by GitHub username to locate and install addons. They seem be doing some cheeky legal maneuvering about which ones to get, for example, this "Transparency Report" [tvaddons.co] seems to list the names of the "blacklisted" usernames.
LibreELEC [wikipedia.org] is a fork of OpenELEC [wikipedia.org], which is a cut-down version of Kodi intended for Raspberry Pi. It appears to come with some addons by default. You'll have to ask around if this distribution is necessary because your Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is a lot more powerful than the original (quadruple the RAM, quadruple the cores, double clock speed, etc.).
Plex [wikipedia.org] seems to be software to allow you to stream videos from your NAS.
Google is your friend?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:58AM (1 child)
Exodus was abandoned long ago. As also was its Covenant fork.
The latest fork is called Incursion, but even this has not been updated in 5 months already, with pending pull request you need to apply manually.
Seems that we are going to need a .onion addon repo + anonymous git.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 19 2018, @01:21AM
Not exactly. It was abandoned and then some other group took over development:
I installed Kodi, followed the instructions to install Exodus, and started playing a movie successfully, all in under 30 minutes.
The add-on release appears to be from June 2018, and it's working right now.
If other add-ons are better or more frequently updated, I can't speak to that. But it works.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:11AM
Same as I thought after my 16GB EVO died after just 18 months. The 32GB EVO should last more since it's barely 25% full and running OpenElec 24/7 almost always idle. And Samsung offers 10 year warranty, right, right? Well it didn't last much more than a year and 15€ down the drain, again. And try to get a RMA warranty... LOL. *sad face*
Now I'm considering using berryboot to install LibreElec in an iscsi target of my NAS and boot from network.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:05AM (14 children)
I've tried using Kodi a couple of times, and I've always given up in frustration.
Its user interface is chaotic. Trying to do just about anything on it feels like stumbling in the dark. It takes a lot of time finding how to do it and, by the time I do, I've forgotten how I got there, so I have to search for it again, next time.
Kodi without any plugins may be legal, but there's very little, if anything, that you can do without plugins. Want to play media from your own drive? (You know, the default function of a media player.) You need a plugin for that, and you need to configure it to look for media in specific places; you can't just open a file and play it. If you do add plugins, they require updates, but updates often fail, without any indication of what went wrong, other than a message to check the log. (What log?)
I'm sure that seasoned Kodi users will tell me that I need to do non-obvious thing X and/or install plugin Y to overcome this, to which my answer is "my point, exactly".
I tried using Kodi on my Raspberry Pi, because it's supposed to be hardware accelerated, so that I don't have to use the command line based omxplayer or a custom compiled version of mpv using smplayer as a GUI; I stuck with omxplayer.
As for LibreELEC, I just looked it up, and I don't see the point in it. Just because Rapsberry says that you can use an SD card that's barely large enough for the OS to fit, doesn't mean that you should do so. I got a larger one, so that I can have space for my applications as well, without sacrificing any parts of the OS. This is also saving some wear and tear om the SD card, as the OS does not keep banging again and again on the same few free memory cells during regular usage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:26AM
Using Kodi when you are after the experience of VLC is definitely going to disappoint. Before the piracy addon fad hit, I used XBMC to organize and play my media library with a remote. With a little work on file naming conventions, it's nice for that job. But it's trash for playing any local media that it can't match against its sources for metadata. Definitely a tool for someone with a lot of spare time.
(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.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday August 14 2018, @12:24PM (2 children)
(Do point out which version of kodi you use(d/tried). Leia (18.x - current) and Gotham (13.x - 2014) are very different experiences (and that is before you start messing with the skins))
Regarding watching local files. Just enter Videos - Files - [first time 'add videos' and select a directory, should at this point be one of two options available] - select relevant added directory - just browse it.
The "non-obvious" part might be to try "videos" as well as "movies" (and possibly "tv shows").
I didn't even look at plugins for the first couple of months (used it to play from an smb-server in the lan, the setup btw was pretty much similar as above, but I selected "smb" instead of "root directory" for the 'add videos')
However I do agree that the "media library" is an unwanted distraction - so I just skip using it. But quite frankly, unless you are in a controller/remote-control/touch-screen setup then kodi is a worse choice than just using a command line player. (Unless you want the media library, appearantly some people like it).
Using Kodi on an RPi, works pretty nice - especially the integration with lirc (IR-control).
What drove you to the impression that you need plugins (except the ones that comes bundled - not that a non-coder should notice those) to use kodi for local files?
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:01PM (1 child)
The fact that I could find no way to play a local file using Kodi. If it's there, somewhere, it is very well hidden. Searching the Internet on how to play local files using Kodi, I found some instructions involving a plug-in. It may or may not have been the built-in plug-in that you mentioned; I don't remember. Even if it was, a media player that requires a plug-in to play media is not exactly a media player, is it?
For those asking what version I have (which in itself is not very encouraging; if you need to know the version of your media player, in order to play media, something is definitely wrong), I have version 17.6, the version that comes with Raspbian
In any case, given the other answers to my comment, I don't think that Kodi is for me.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday August 15 2018, @02:11PM
Thanks for the answer - I suspected a wonky guide was involved somewhere.
The bundled plugins are stuff like the skin and a media library functions (those pure eyecandy that can be ignored, mainly for the sake of importing nfo-files) - so only the skin (which is what would be called "the UI" in other programs) needs to be involved (of the plugins) for playing local files.
I have a suspicion you ended up with a guide how to set up the media library (and that one is a PITA to deal with), if you encountered the word "scraper" it was such a guide.
Regarding the "the file not included in the directory" complaint. I added "root directory" on my first run, so my entire fs was included in the directory (not using the media library has major advantages).
Well, Gotham was back when it was called XBMC. Quite frankly all media players I use now (including mplayer and VLC) was very different experiences when I started using them compared to how they are now.
But yes, I agree the player isn't for you (at the current intended usage). You seem to expect a computer-style media player rather than a home theatre media player and in that case Kodi is just about the worst mismatch possible outside of touchscreen interfaces (which Leia (18.x) aims to handle as well - so it gets progressivly an even worse match for you).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @07:51PM
Yeah, Kodi was just frustrating the few times I tried to use it. I find emulationstation + mpd for music and mpv for video to cover my use cases much more simply, stably, and less headache inducing. Mapping controllers is a pain in the ass, but at least the shit just works.