7 ms·

Kodi “Matrix” 19.5 Release, Last Before "Nexus" 20.0

57 points by cf100clunk 4y ago

cf100clunk 4y ago
On a 6-year-old Android 6.0 box it is noticeably snappier than was 19.4, although on very new devices (Android >10) this is not noticeable to me. It was a drop-in replacement to the prior version with no reconfiguration required.
synergy20 4y ago
Used it while it was called XMBC then, it's one of those great and legendary open source software. these days movies are streamed over the network on-demand so the use case has shifted for Kodi I think. Still would like to try this again with my ever growing media libraries(family videos and pictures basically).
hermitcrab 4y ago
I quite like Kodi and I really appreciate the work of the people that make it available for free. But it seems rather buggy. I've had several versions of Kodi installed on 2 different media PCs. Each version was flakey in a different way. The current version (v18.0) won't let us see (or cancel) shows that we set up to record. So every time they re-run 'Impossible Engineering' (which is often) they all get recorded again. But I'm nervous about upgrading in case the more recent version is even more buggy!
- cf100clunk 4y ago
  > The current version (v18.0) I'm thinking you meant the version installed on your device. Have you tried upgrading to at least 19.4? The improvement in fit and polish will likely be quite clear.
  - hermitcrab 4y ago
    >I'm thinking you meant the version installed on your device. Yes, that is what I meant. I should have been clearer. >Have you tried upgrading to at least 19.4? No. Should I? Each time I have upgraded previously it seems to have fixed some bugs and introduced others. How stable is v19.4 or v19.5?
    - cf100clunk 4y ago
      Daily driver that I've mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34175171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34175171
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  So, not long ago I pulled out an old Xbox OG, and started setting up XBMC. I turned on some UPNP stuff, and I locked up. I had to reboot the Xbox. I did the EXACT SAME THING on my PC a month later, had the exact same lockup. I had to task manager kill it. I was not impressed, seeing the same bug 10? software years later?
- thefz 4y ago
  It can be quirky sometimes but I remember it being the only player correctly offloading decoding work to the GPU on Linux (so no stuttering) when 90% of the others required manually intervening on the compositor.
jacob019 4y ago
I have been a daily user since XBMC was available for the original Xbox. It just keeps getting better. Big thanks to the Kodi team!
- basch 4y ago
  its pretty amazing the reach and impact they have had over the last two decades. The amount of software derived from it goes undernoticed. Plex started out as a pseudoofficial OS X fork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_based_on_Kodi_and_XBMC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_based_on_Kodi...
lostmsu 4y ago
I love Kodi, and still prefer it over JellyFin. But as others mention their grievances, mine are: - on FireTV when I play video with 5.1 soundtrack, if the Fire goes to screensaver during pause, on a daily basis Kodi stops producing any sound upon resuming. Eventually it freezes. The only fix is force closing the player, which is not a trivial task on Android/Fire. Takes time to start it back up too. This does not happen to other players. - for some reason after scanning every TV show episode appears in library twice. Not sure if it is fixable in any way but resetting player data all together, which means loosing settings, so I just endure that.
- bbvgbvbxj 4y ago
  the jellyfin add-on for kodi is the best of both worlds. jellyfin stuff all appears natively in your Kofi library
notafraudster 4y ago
I used Kodi for many years (consistently since about 2008 and periodically before then) and stopped last year, largely because the no server, thick client architecture is less useful than it used to be. At this point almost everything I want to play video on has hardware accelerated H264 and H265 decoding, and so almost nothing I play involves transcoding. I ended up moving to Plex, not out of any particular love for Plex, just a basic idea that the value of having a server running exceeded the cost. With Kodi I was relying on a bodge of extensions to sync watch status across clients, was maintaining libraries on clients separately (I know Kodi supports remote MySQL-managed libraries, but if I was going to run a MySQL server on my storage and run some kind of background process to handle library updating, why not run a server like Plex?)... stuff took forever to sync, performance for library management was not great. Even for browsing, I found Kodi not very performant for large libraries. Switching away had some other benefits besides library management. Although Plex has more restrictive UI options, the default UI is much more wife/mom/friend approved. My wife had a stint in a hospital and we could watch films synced, together, using Plex (which also handled all the routing/port forwarding/whatever internally) The Sub-Zero plugin for Plex (now discontinued, but still operational) let me fill out subtitles for my content. Plex Media Manager let me integrate a bunch of external stuff into my library including syncing Letterboxd lists into my library. Mobile support is first class (including a somewhat janky download feature that's great for flying) After switching away I kept an eye on Kodi, and the major thing I noticed is that development cadence is pretty slow at this point compared to Plex. Now, this is because Plex is VC backed and charges money for certain features, and dispositionally that annoys me a little bit. But it also does contribute to wider platform support and faster feature iteration. A lot about Plex sucks. They piss away tons of time and effort onto VC-friendly features that have nothing to do with what Plex is. They're currently pursuing some nonsense where you use Plex to search for things available on Netflix and watch it there. They also launched their own free, ad supported streaming service which is annoyingly intrusive. They are stubborn about some design stuff that the entire userbase dislikes. They push incredibly awful changes and then act shocked when they get hundreds of comments from paying customers complaining about how bad the changes are -- recently it was a loud and annoying noise playing on startup. They reverted it after a day, but just generally I get the feeling Plex as a team either doesn't know what their audience wants or deliberately ignores it for VC reason. Obviously I'd be happier if it was free and open source. Personally, I could easily see switching away from Plex to Jellyfin or Enby, but I can't imagine switching back to a serverless media setup.
mark-r 4y ago
Is anybody else bothered that they can't put it in the Google store because they chose to support an older version of Android than what's allowed?
- 29083011397778 4y ago
  Annoyed at... Google, rght? Because my older phones don't explode when they get relegated to being a Kodi remote, and this is 100% on Google.
  - mark-r 4y ago
    Yes, annoyed at Google. They're flexing their monopoly power a bit too much.
- chungy 4y ago
  At least an APK can be installed without the Play Store. But yes, I believe Google's requirement is absurd.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  It's not from supporting an earlier version but targeting an earlier version. You can support earlier versions and target a newer version. Presumably, that's what they're doing in 20, but it requires so many changes that it isn't worth their time to backport them to 19. https://stackoverflow.com/a/47269079 https://stackoverflow.com/a/47269079

57 points by cf100clunk 4y ago

On a 6-year-old Android 6.0 box it is noticeably snappier than was 19.4, although on very new devices (Android >10) this is not noticeable to me. It was a drop-in replacement to the prior version with no reconfiguration required.

synergy20 4y ago

Used it while it was called XMBC then, it's one of those great and legendary open source software. these days movies are streamed over the network on-demand so the use case has shifted for Kodi I think. Still would like to try this again with my ever growing media libraries(family videos and pictures basically).

hermitcrab 4y ago

I quite like Kodi and I really appreciate the work of the people that make it available for free. But it seems rather buggy. I've had several versions of Kodi installed on 2 different media PCs. Each version was flakey in a different way. The current version (v18.0) won't let us see (or cancel) shows that we set up to record. So every time they re-run 'Impossible Engineering' (which is often) they all get recorded again. But I'm nervous about upgrading in case the more recent version is even more buggy!

cf100clunk 4y ago
> The current version (v18.0) I'm thinking you meant the version installed on your device. Have you tried upgrading to at least 19.4? The improvement in fit and polish will likely be quite clear.
- hermitcrab 4y ago
  >I'm thinking you meant the version installed on your device. Yes, that is what I meant. I should have been clearer. >Have you tried upgrading to at least 19.4? No. Should I? Each time I have upgraded previously it seems to have fixed some bugs and introduced others. How stable is v19.4 or v19.5?
  - cf100clunk 4y ago
    Daily driver that I've mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34175171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34175171
xen2xen1 4y ago
So, not long ago I pulled out an old Xbox OG, and started setting up XBMC. I turned on some UPNP stuff, and I locked up. I had to reboot the Xbox. I did the EXACT SAME THING on my PC a month later, had the exact same lockup. I had to task manager kill it. I was not impressed, seeing the same bug 10? software years later?
thefz 4y ago
It can be quirky sometimes but I remember it being the only player correctly offloading decoding work to the GPU on Linux (so no stuttering) when 90% of the others required manually intervening on the compositor.

jacob019 4y ago

I have been a daily user since XBMC was available for the original Xbox. It just keeps getting better. Big thanks to the Kodi team!

basch 4y ago
its pretty amazing the reach and impact they have had over the last two decades. The amount of software derived from it goes undernoticed. Plex started out as a pseudoofficial OS X fork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_based_on_Kodi_and_XBMC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_based_on_Kodi...

lostmsu 4y ago

I love Kodi, and still prefer it over JellyFin. But as others mention their grievances, mine are: - on FireTV when I play video with 5.1 soundtrack, if the Fire goes to screensaver during pause, on a daily basis Kodi stops producing any sound upon resuming. Eventually it freezes. The only fix is force closing the player, which is not a trivial task on Android/Fire. Takes time to start it back up too. This does not happen to other players. - for some reason after scanning every TV show episode appears in library twice. Not sure if it is fixable in any way but resetting player data all together, which means loosing settings, so I just endure that.

bbvgbvbxj 4y ago
the jellyfin add-on for kodi is the best of both worlds. jellyfin stuff all appears natively in your Kofi library

notafraudster 4y ago

I used Kodi for many years (consistently since about 2008 and periodically before then) and stopped last year, largely because the no server, thick client architecture is less useful than it used to be. At this point almost everything I want to play video on has hardware accelerated H264 and H265 decoding, and so almost nothing I play involves transcoding. I ended up moving to Plex, not out of any particular love for Plex, just a basic idea that the value of having a server running exceeded the cost. With Kodi I was relying on a bodge of extensions to sync watch status across clients, was maintaining libraries on clients separately (I know Kodi supports remote MySQL-managed libraries, but if I was going to run a MySQL server on my storage and run some kind of background process to handle library updating, why not run a server like Plex?)... stuff took forever to sync, performance for library management was not great. Even for browsing, I found Kodi not very performant for large libraries. Switching away had some other benefits besides library management. Although Plex has more restrictive UI options, the default UI is much more wife/mom/friend approved. My wife had a stint in a hospital and we could watch films synced, together, using Plex (which also handled all the routing/port forwarding/whatever internally) The Sub-Zero plugin for Plex (now discontinued, but still operational) let me fill out subtitles for my content. Plex Media Manager let me integrate a bunch of external stuff into my library including syncing Letterboxd lists into my library. Mobile support is first class (including a somewhat janky download feature that's great for flying) After switching away I kept an eye on Kodi, and the major thing I noticed is that development cadence is pretty slow at this point compared to Plex. Now, this is because Plex is VC backed and charges money for certain features, and dispositionally that annoys me a little bit. But it also does contribute to wider platform support and faster feature iteration. A lot about Plex sucks. They piss away tons of time and effort onto VC-friendly features that have nothing to do with what Plex is. They're currently pursuing some nonsense where you use Plex to search for things available on Netflix and watch it there. They also launched their own free, ad supported streaming service which is annoyingly intrusive. They are stubborn about some design stuff that the entire userbase dislikes. They push incredibly awful changes and then act shocked when they get hundreds of comments from paying customers complaining about how bad the changes are -- recently it was a loud and annoying noise playing on startup. They reverted it after a day, but just generally I get the feeling Plex as a team either doesn't know what their audience wants or deliberately ignores it for VC reason. Obviously I'd be happier if it was free and open source. Personally, I could easily see switching away from Plex to Jellyfin or Enby, but I can't imagine switching back to a serverless media setup.

mark-r 4y ago

Is anybody else bothered that they can't put it in the Google store because they chose to support an older version of Android than what's allowed?

29083011397778 4y ago
Annoyed at... Google, rght? Because my older phones don't explode when they get relegated to being a Kodi remote, and this is 100% on Google.
- mark-r 4y ago
  Yes, annoyed at Google. They're flexing their monopoly power a bit too much.
chungy 4y ago
At least an APK can be installed without the Play Store. But yes, I believe Google's requirement is absurd.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
It's not from supporting an earlier version but targeting an earlier version. You can support earlier versions and target a newer version. Presumably, that's what they're doing in 20, but it requires so many changes that it isn't worth their time to backport them to 19. https://stackoverflow.com/a/47269079 https://stackoverflow.com/a/47269079