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Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could cal

Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.

robofunk 11mo ago
If my memory is not faulty it was even able to stream movies from multi volume rar files over SAMBA which felt like magic. IYKYK
- notyourwork 11mo ago
  Oh yea - and DCC transfers for content from IRC. mmmmm
- bombcar 11mo ago
  Being able to play VIDEO_TS files directly blew my mind; no need to argue about compression with our massive 250 GB drives ... ;)
- ElCapitanMarkla 11mo ago
  Yeah that part was amazing. It was 2006, I'd softmoded the Xbox with the Splinter Cell hack. I had 2MBs ADSL capped @ 10GB for international data but unlimited national. I was in a NZ only private tracker to take advantage of that and then the icing on the cake, streaming the multi volume rar files straight to the TV. It really was magic.
Sanzig 11mo ago
I managed to get a fully working XBMC+Samba setup back when I was probably 13 or 14 in the mid-2000s. Echoing the sentiment that it really was far ahead of its time. I'd torrent a movie or show, it'd appear on the network share, and then I could watch it immediately in the living room in glorious 480p on a tube TV. This was before Netflix instant watch existed, truly felt like something from the future.
- rootsudo 11mo ago
  Crazy this was about 20 years ago...
  - notyourwork 11mo ago
    And now streaming services are becoming “cable networks”. Capitalism at its finest.
    - asdff 11mo ago
      "Cut the cord and stop paying $80/mo" Funny how that was just representative of the money left on the table that was to be snatched up anyhow before long.
    - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      Cabled offered far less content, with far less convenience, with far more ad breaks, for far more money. The current situation is far preferable to being restricted to a specific screen in your home, controlled by a specific box, usable only with long term contracts, where you had to wait on hold on the phone and be home during 4 hour windows for a technician just to get something installed or canceled.
      - nativeit 11mo ago
        Key word there is “current”. It’s quickly moving the other way.
        lotsofpulp 11mo ago
        Which way? The only movement is increasing monthly prices, which should be expected given inflation.
        vanc_cefepime 11mo ago
        More ad time. Higher monthly prices. More fracturing of content requiring more subscriptions. One of the pros these days is that it’s all on demand. Back in the day you had to make time to watch a show on a certain time unless you were affluent enough to own a DVR. Writing is on the wall. Streaming services will become (already is IMO) just like the old cable industry.
phantasmish 11mo ago
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”. I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it. Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back. And no, alternative skins never improved that any. Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help. I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems. Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system. [edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/
- rightbyte 11mo ago
  You need to reach for their inner cheap skates.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content. 1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do something" button + cardinal direction controls. So if I push "left" on my remote, to this day, I am not really confident about what it's going to do. If I push the "do it" button, is it going to pause? Bring up a context menu? Bring up some other kind of overlay? Who knows? The whole input system needs simplification and an acceptance of today's terrible remote control hardware. Not just the "back" thing you mention which yes, is terrible. 2. Reliability: Unlike something like VLC, Kodi decidedly does NOT playback everything you throw at it, but it's been getting better. I've often seen it shudder, quit unexpectedly, freeze, and it doesn't seem to handle scrubbing forward and backward in the file very well. When I sit down with my family to watch a movie, I always have that voice in the back of my head that says "Am I going to have to take 10 minutes to try to get this movie to work, awkwardly, while my family sits on the sofa looking at me?" 3. Media content: Kodi's insistence on grafting its own "library" on top of my already-working filesystem is just terrible. I can't just add a file to a directory. Nooooooo that would be too simple. I have to add the file, and then go into Kodi and try to figure out how to get it to re-scan and import these files. To this day, I don't think I can tell you what menu to navigate to to import content. And fuck me if I do something wildly unusual like rename a file. That said, it's nicer than everything else I've tried. It has an actual TV-centric interface that has all the nice things you'd expect (poster / album art, artist / actor info, genres, and so on). Kodi's flaws are not annoying enough for me to take the time to try something else like Jellyfin or Plex. But with your comment, I might be motivated to try out Jellyfin. It's hard to tell from their web site what they offer that differentiates them from Kodi, but it's probably worth an explore.
lproven 11mo ago
> I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Me too. It was a life-changing tool: take some cast-off free hardware and a bit of free software, using an exploit to an old game that cost me £2 and a tool to put it on a memory card that cost me £5 (both second-hand off eBay), I had a media player that could stream to my (free) TV. I spent many hundreds of hours watching it, and about 30 mins of playing games on the thing ever. I still have it but it's in a basement in another country. Now I want to see if it still works, and if I can upgrade it.
stuaxo 11mo ago
Same, and I count Kodi in the not good enough interfaces. Two things make it worse: The Xbox controllers were great for navigation vs a remote control. SMB1 was much easier to setup and use vs modern samba.
torh 11mo ago
Still have the original Xbox, working like a charm. Not sure which version of XBMC it has, but the internal disk is full of old series and movies. Still has a share on my computer mapped up, but the original Xbox can't keep up with the big files.

Ye I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Like, I have yet to encounter such a good interface for a "smart TV" or whatever you could call it. It worked flawlessly.

robofunk 11mo ago

If my memory is not faulty it was even able to stream movies from multi volume rar files over SAMBA which felt like magic. IYKYK

notyourwork 11mo ago
Oh yea - and DCC transfers for content from IRC. mmmmm
bombcar 11mo ago
Being able to play VIDEO_TS files directly blew my mind; no need to argue about compression with our massive 250 GB drives ... ;)
ElCapitanMarkla 11mo ago
Yeah that part was amazing. It was 2006, I'd softmoded the Xbox with the Splinter Cell hack. I had 2MBs ADSL capped @ 10GB for international data but unlimited national. I was in a NZ only private tracker to take advantage of that and then the icing on the cake, streaming the multi volume rar files straight to the TV. It really was magic.

Sanzig 11mo ago

I managed to get a fully working XBMC+Samba setup back when I was probably 13 or 14 in the mid-2000s. Echoing the sentiment that it really was far ahead of its time. I'd torrent a movie or show, it'd appear on the network share, and then I could watch it immediately in the living room in glorious 480p on a tube TV. This was before Netflix instant watch existed, truly felt like something from the future.

rootsudo 11mo ago
Crazy this was about 20 years ago...
- notyourwork 11mo ago
  And now streaming services are becoming “cable networks”. Capitalism at its finest.
  - asdff 11mo ago
    "Cut the cord and stop paying $80/mo" Funny how that was just representative of the money left on the table that was to be snatched up anyhow before long.
  - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
    Cabled offered far less content, with far less convenience, with far more ad breaks, for far more money. The current situation is far preferable to being restricted to a specific screen in your home, controlled by a specific box, usable only with long term contracts, where you had to wait on hold on the phone and be home during 4 hour windows for a technician just to get something installed or canceled.
    - nativeit 11mo ago
      Key word there is “current”. It’s quickly moving the other way.
      - lotsofpulp 11mo ago
        Which way? The only movement is increasing monthly prices, which should be expected given inflation.
        vanc_cefepime 11mo ago
        More ad time. Higher monthly prices. More fracturing of content requiring more subscriptions. One of the pros these days is that it’s all on demand. Back in the day you had to make time to watch a show on a certain time unless you were affluent enough to own a DVR. Writing is on the wall. Streaming services will become (already is IMO) just like the old cable industry.

phantasmish 11mo ago

I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”. I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it. Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back. And no, alternative skins never improved that any. Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help. I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems. Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system. [edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/

rightbyte 11mo ago
You need to reach for their inner cheap skates.
ryandrake 11mo ago
I've also been a Kodi user since it was XBMC (I originally bought an X-box purely to run XBMC). In my view, its biggest UX drawbacks are 1. how it works with remote controls, 2. playback reliability, and 3. importing content. 1. Remotes: Most remotes now don't have dedicated stop/pause/play/forward/rewind buttons, so we have to map those functions to a single "do something" remote button, or at best a single "do something" button + cardinal direction controls. So if I push "left" on my remote, to this day, I am not really confident about what it's going to do. If I push the "do it" button, is it going to pause? Bring up a context menu? Bring up some other kind of overlay? Who knows? The whole input system needs simplification and an acceptance of today's terrible remote control hardware. Not just the "back" thing you mention which yes, is terrible. 2. Reliability: Unlike something like VLC, Kodi decidedly does NOT playback everything you throw at it, but it's been getting better. I've often seen it shudder, quit unexpectedly, freeze, and it doesn't seem to handle scrubbing forward and backward in the file very well. When I sit down with my family to watch a movie, I always have that voice in the back of my head that says "Am I going to have to take 10 minutes to try to get this movie to work, awkwardly, while my family sits on the sofa looking at me?" 3. Media content: Kodi's insistence on grafting its own "library" on top of my already-working filesystem is just terrible. I can't just add a file to a directory. Nooooooo that would be too simple. I have to add the file, and then go into Kodi and try to figure out how to get it to re-scan and import these files. To this day, I don't think I can tell you what menu to navigate to to import content. And fuck me if I do something wildly unusual like rename a file. That said, it's nicer than everything else I've tried. It has an actual TV-centric interface that has all the nice things you'd expect (poster / album art, artist / actor info, genres, and so on). Kodi's flaws are not annoying enough for me to take the time to try something else like Jellyfin or Plex. But with your comment, I might be motivated to try out Jellyfin. It's hard to tell from their web site what they offer that differentiates them from Kodi, but it's probably worth an explore.

lproven 11mo ago

> I used it with Samba network drives to watch movies on the TV. Me too. It was a life-changing tool: take some cast-off free hardware and a bit of free software, using an exploit to an old game that cost me £2 and a tool to put it on a memory card that cost me £5 (both second-hand off eBay), I had a media player that could stream to my (free) TV. I spent many hundreds of hours watching it, and about 30 mins of playing games on the thing ever. I still have it but it's in a basement in another country. Now I want to see if it still works, and if I can upgrade it.

stuaxo 11mo ago

Same, and I count Kodi in the not good enough interfaces. Two things make it worse: The Xbox controllers were great for navigation vs a remote control. SMB1 was much easier to setup and use vs modern samba.

torh 11mo ago

Still have the original Xbox, working like a charm. Not sure which version of XBMC it has, but the internal disk is full of old series and movies. Still has a share on my computer mapped up, but the original Xbox can't keep up with the big files.