The Kodi/XBMC Thread - Watch things and stuff

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > The Kodi/XBMC Thread - Watch things and stuff

Bleh Maestro: Aug 30, 2003

Call Me Charlie posted:

Turn on upnp in Kodi on your pc and hit the share through the Roku Media Player channel. It's a dirty solution but it will direct play everything you throw at it (except files with DTS audio unless you use a receiver)

Cool I will give it a try. Thanks!

e: For example most bluray x264 / MKV files would work?

# ? Jul 12, 2016 22:04

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 02:11

Call Me Charlie: Dec 3, 2005; by Smythe

Bleh Maestro posted:

Cool I will give it a try. Thanks!

e: For example most bluray x264 / MKV files would work?

As long as the host PC is plugged into ethernet and the x264/mkv files don't have DTS audio, it should work fine.

The interface is hot garbage and a large Kodi library can take awhile to load but at least you'll be able to watch it on your tv.

# ? Jul 12, 2016 22:14

Ixian: Oct 9, 2001; Many machines on Ix....new machines; Pillbug

If you are that bent over missing the sale/$50 for the only device that does exactly what you are looking for, and well, then just wait for it to go on sale again. Nvidia has had various deals on it at least 4 time in the last 6 months not even counting the Prime Day deal.

Call Me Charlie isn't wrong, that method will work, most of the time, but it sucks and you'll end up hating it in short order. That's going the long way around just to have remote headphones.

# ? Jul 13, 2016 02:01

Lowen SoDium: Jun 5, 2003; Highen Fiber; Clapping Larry

Bleh Maestro posted:

I'll probably look out for a used one or something. I'd pay $150 for just the regular bundle but not 200 I don't think. It looks good though. The roku does all of this minus Kodi, which I should have thought about sooner. Oh well, still watching all my downloaded movies on my computer in TYOOL 2016.

Alternatively, there is an Emby app and a Plex app for Roku, if you are willing to run a server for either.

# ? Jul 13, 2016 20:31

Ixian: Oct 9, 2001; Many machines on Ix....new machines; Pillbug

Lowen SoDium posted:

Alternatively, there is an Emby app and a Plex app for Roku, if you are willing to run a server for either.

Both are functional (I have a Roku 3 in my guest room) but not nearly as nice as the FireTV/Android TV versions. And because it's Roku both servers transcode a lot more.

Basically it works (better than UPnP) but it's not great.

# ? Jul 14, 2016 00:50

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Just totally wiped XBMC 13.2 and installed Kodi 16.1 on my AMZFTV. I've been using it since ~January 2014. I'm still having problems properly parsing TV shows on my windows SMB share. I can browse to them directly via videos/files/sharename, but only a handful of things show up in tv shows/recently added or one of the other sub options. Instead of 50+ titles showing up, only about six show up as properly scanned by the tvdb thing and put in the tv shows/recently added.

Ok so I have two smb shares

smb://path/to/tv
smb://path/to/movie

tv shows go in tv smb share, kodi content type is set to "tv" and defaults etc
movies go in movie smb share, kodi content type is set to "movies" and defaults etc

I have the movies getting scraped correctly etc. No complaints there.
However for TV it's picking up just two or three series. They use the standard Name.S01E01 naming convention

Can one badly named show wreck the entire tvdb scraping system?

# ? Aug 3, 2016 11:43

Lowen SoDium: Jun 5, 2003; Highen Fiber; Clapping Larry

Are your shows in separate folders?

# ? Aug 3, 2016 12:36

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

There's a root TV folder, and about half are loose in the root folder, and the other half, one episode is in its own folder each.

The six or so episodes it picked up, half are in separate folders, the other half are loose.

# ? Aug 4, 2016 02:09

Ixian: Oct 9, 2001; Many machines on Ix....new machines; Pillbug

Hadlock posted:

There's a root TV folder, and about half are loose in the root folder, and the other half, one episode is in its own folder each.

The six or so episodes it picked up, half are in separate folders, the other half are loose.

Not saying that can't work but....that sounds a little jacked.

If you had each show separated by folder, and even better by season inside the show folder, you'd probably never have a scraping problem again, with anything.

# ? Aug 4, 2016 02:19

phosdex: Dec 16, 2005

You should make separate folders for each show. Check out Sonarr, it's pretty handy.

# ? Aug 4, 2016 02:20

Puddin: Apr 9, 2004; Leave it to Brak

Who doesn't order everything by folders anyway? That sounds like an absolute nightmare to browse.

# ? Aug 4, 2016 02:33

The Gunslinger: Jul 24, 2004; Do not forget the face of your father.; Fun Shoe

Hadlock posted:

There's a root TV folder, and about half are loose in the root folder, and the other half, one episode is in its own folder each.

The six or so episodes it picked up, half are in separate folders, the other half are loose.

You should put everything into its own folder, it will take like 5 minutes tops and solve your problem.

Name\Season 01\Filename 1x01.ext has never failed me. For remakes I use Name (Year)

Sonarr takes care of all that for me too which is nice.

The Gunslinger fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Aug 4, 2016

# ? Aug 4, 2016 14:58

John Capslocke: Jun 5, 2007

Hadlock posted:

There's a root TV folder, and about half are loose in the root folder, and the other half, one episode is in its own folder each.

The six or so episodes it picked up, half are in separate folders, the other half are loose.

I am honestly surprised that scanner ever worked for something that messy.

Time to Sonarr-ify your library.

# ? Aug 4, 2016 15:40

Internet Explorer: Jun 1, 2005

Are there any good ways to handle renames (using Sonarr or something else) while still allowing seeding on torrents? That's my whole problem with the separate TV/Movie folders and keeping my library more organized.

# ? Aug 4, 2016 19:15

MeKeV: Aug 10, 2010

Sonarr supports hardlinks, but my download folder is on a different drive to my media, so I've never tried it out.

# ? Aug 4, 2016 19:39

Keito: Jul 21, 2005; WHAT DO I CHOOSE ?

SickRage supports both softlinks and hardlinks, the former option works across drives too. I would expect Sonarr to be able to do the same.

# ? Aug 4, 2016 23:37

Internet Explorer: Jun 1, 2005

Awesome, thanks for the suggestions.

# ? Aug 5, 2016 00:49

Internet Explorer: Jun 1, 2005

It looks like Sonarr only does shows. For shows and movies, is there anything that supports hardlinks? Something like CouchPotato or SickRage? Sorry, my downloading setup is rather basic and I haven't used any of these programs. Let me know if there is a better thread.

# ? Aug 5, 2016 01:29

IUG: Jul 14, 2007

Is SickRage some new form of SickBeard? Did SickBeard die off or get forked?

# ? Aug 5, 2016 02:28

Thermopyle: Jul 1, 2003; ...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. �Bertrand Russell

Yes. Yes.

# ? Aug 5, 2016 03:08

Ixian: Oct 9, 2001; Many machines on Ix....new machines; Pillbug

Sickbeard more or less died off/dev lost interest, Sickrage (a fork of it) picked up the slack, and Sonarr, which is what you should be using, does the same things, but better, and is not related code-wise.

For movies there's still pretty much just Couchpotato, which has gotten better or worse depending on who you ask and what day it is.

# ? Aug 5, 2016 05:42

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

Puddin posted:

Who doesn't order everything by folders anyway? That sounds like an absolute nightmare to browse.

I once lived with a guy who just had a folder "TV" where he would put the files as they were downloaded. Whatever scene or random P2P name it had was the name it would keep.

He would actually argue that this was easier for him to find things and complained that I kept the shared fileserver organized.

# ? Aug 5, 2016 16:56

Chilled Milk: Jun 22, 2003; No one here is alone,
satellites in every home

Having a FreeNAS set up with Emby, Sonarr, CouchPotato, and Transmission all talking to each other and mostly Just Working is kind of insane and good

# ? Aug 5, 2016 17:03

photomikey: Dec 30, 2012

Can I set up a Pi 3 behind my TV with ~500GB of storage on it, run Kodi on it for video playback in person (95% of its use), then also use it as a rudimentary file server to play video elsewhere in the house (5% of the use), and ideally do a little light torrenting from it?

This is my first foray into Pi.

End goal is to find something with a higher WAF. Currently running Plex server on an iMac that runs (mostly) 24/7 but sometimes sleeps and in general does not have 100% uptime and frustrates the wife.

Also, I enjoy tinkering.

# ? Aug 7, 2016 21:35

GutBomb: Jun 15, 2005; Dude?

photomikey posted:

Can I set up a Pi 3 behind my TV with ~500GB of storage on it, run Kodi on it for video playback in person (95% of its use), then also use it as a rudimentary file server to play video elsewhere in the house (5% of the use), and ideally do a little light torrenting from it?

This is my first foray into Pi.

End goal is to find something with a higher WAF. Currently running Plex server on an iMac that runs (mostly) 24/7 but sometimes sleeps and in general does not have 100% uptime and frustrates the wife.

Also, I enjoy tinkering.

I do exactly that. I have a pi3 with retropie on it with tons of emulators and roms. It also in the background runs sonarr, nzbget, transmission, and couchpotato for downloading content. Content gets played locally through kodi and remotely (using smb shares) on my iPad with infuse. It all runs fine. When something is downloaded the system can get kind of slow while it unpacks the RARs but that only slows down playing games. It doesn't affect video playback.

I have a 3TB external usb drive holding the media and ROMs and a usb infrared remote dongle (flirc) for controlling with my Logitech harmony remote.

It's very friendly for the rest of the family who are not technically inclined and after getting it all set up it "just works"

I was using a Mac Mini as an emulation box and plex server and using an Apple TV 4 as a plex client. I replaced that $700 equipment with about $120 worth of stuff (the pi, case, power supply, external drive, as card, and power supply) and the only things it doesn't do that my old setup did is AirPlay which o rarely used and Netflix which I don't really care about.

It was fun figuring everything out and getting it all working, and really cool to use since everything works so well together.

GutBomb fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 7, 2016

# ? Aug 7, 2016 22:02

Ixian: Oct 9, 2001; Many machines on Ix....new machines; Pillbug

photomikey posted:

Can I set up a Pi 3 behind my TV with ~500GB of storage on it, run Kodi on it for video playback in person (95% of its use), then also use it as a rudimentary file server to play video elsewhere in the house (5% of the use), and ideally do a little light torrenting from it?

This is my first foray into Pi.

End goal is to find something with a higher WAF. Currently running Plex server on an iMac that runs (mostly) 24/7 but sometimes sleeps and in general does not have 100% uptime and frustrates the wife.

Also, I enjoy tinkering.

The Pi 3 can handle that, yes, as long as the remote clients are handling the trancoding locally. If you want a server side solution (like Emby and Plex provide) you need something with more juice, but you probably guessed that.

If your remote clients are also running Kodi on Pi 3's then you're covered.

SMB sharing will work fine. Your network cabling will most likely be the limiting factor there, not the Pi CPU/NIC. Naturally if you go wireless instead that goes double.

# ? Aug 8, 2016 18:12

Chilled Milk: Jun 22, 2003; No one here is alone,
satellites in every home

Not sure where best to ask this, but I figure folks following this thread will have some insight. If there's a better place for this please let me know.

I'm getting ready to rip my DVD collection to my NAS (w/Emby), so I can just pack the discs away and reclaim some shelf space. My question is if it's crazy or not to use x265 right now. Everything I try to look up on it says "No don't use it yet", but they're also from 2013.

I've been running some test encodes with Handbrake Nightly that have been pretty encouraging. Like straight up 50% smaller for at least the same quality. Space isn't a huge concern, but that big of an improvement is hard to ignore.

Obviously, decoding support is a concern, but my main target is a Shield TV which should have native support. On my computers I use Emby web clients (FF/Chrome), which looks like will require transcoding for now, and XBMC which I'm sure will be fine. And once in a blue moon I'll watch something on iOS, which I'm not sure if they can direct play or not.

I've got a Xeon E3-1245 V5 in the NAS, so I figure transcoding one or two streams wouldn't be much of an issue, especially this SD stuff.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 06:17

Sarah Problem: Sep 24, 2002; Because, if you confess with your mouth that Witten is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved

The Milkman posted:

Not sure where best to ask this, but I figure folks following this thread will have some insight. If there's a better place for this please let me know.

I'm getting ready to rip my DVD collection to my NAS (w/Emby), so I can just pack the discs away and reclaim some shelf space. My question is if it's crazy or not to use x265 right now. Everything I try to look up on it says "No don't use it yet", but they're also from 2013.

I've been running some test encodes with Handbrake Nightly that have been pretty encouraging. Like straight up 50% smaller for at least the same quality. Space isn't a huge concern, but that big of an improvement is hard to ignore.

Obviously, decoding support is a concern, but my main target is a Shield TV which should have native support. On my computers I use Emby web clients (FF/Chrome), which looks like will require transcoding for now, and XBMC which I'm sure will be fine. And once in a blue moon I'll watch something on iOS, which I'm not sure if they can direct play or not.

I've got a Xeon E3-1245 V5 in the NAS, so I figure transcoding one or two streams wouldn't be much of an issue, especially this SD stuff.

I don't see a problem with this. I use x265 and it plays fine on my iPhone with the vlc player app.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 12:25

ShaneB: Oct 22, 2002

OK, I have a Xpenology server running on ancient hardware. It can't transcode any video due to the CPU. I currently use an outdated Boxee box for playing files from the server directly, and it works great, but it's pretty slow otherwise and offers none of the cool features of Plex or anything like that.

What's the best replacement for Boxee that can play anything without transcoding from my server? Fire TV with Plex? Nvidia shield?

ShaneB fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Aug 28, 2016

# ? Aug 28, 2016 20:34

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

ShaneB posted:

OK, I have a Xpenology server running on ancient hardware. It can't transcode any video due to the CPU. I currently use an outdated Boxee box for playing files from the server directly, and it works great, but it's pretty slow otherwise and offers none of the cool features of Plex or anything like that.

What's the best replacement for Boxee that can play anything without transcoding from my server? Fire TV with Plex? Nvidia shield?

Shield or a NUC.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 20:38

ShaneB: Oct 22, 2002

LmaoTheKid posted:

Shield or a NUC.

Can Fire TV do it fine, for less money? Or nah.

# ? Aug 28, 2016 20:43

Lowen SoDium: Jun 5, 2003; Highen Fiber; Clapping Larry

ShaneB posted:

Can Fire TV do it fine, for less money? Or nah.

Fire TV is good unless you are playing 4k files. Not sure if it plays h265 or not. Shield TV plays anything but cost 2x as much as a fire TV.

# ? Aug 29, 2016 01:30

Bigsteve: Dec 15, 2000; Cock It!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PpVhCtG4c8

Here is a cute one. These guys are selling what appears to to be kodi running on openelec on a PI to stream Mongoian tv.
This is that through some magic they are claiming that it shows it as if you are watching live. He is in Sweden at 20.08 and watching Mongolian TV as if it is 20.08.
Looks like he is charging a monthly fee, im assuming he is hosting the stream for 24 hours and has made an addon to access it.

Would love to get hold of one to see how he is doing it.

# ? Aug 31, 2016 21:01

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Lowen SoDium posted:

Fire TV is good unless you are playing 4k files. Not sure if it plays h265 or not. Shield TV plays anything but cost 2x as much as a fire TV.

Yeah once you bump up the kodi cache to > 200MB (I prefer 1GB) and kodi network allowance to 35mbps and there are no bottlenecks, the Fire TV is an amazing little machine. Great remote as well. Does 17GB 1080p movies no problem.

# ? Sep 1, 2016 04:19

jonathan: Jul 3, 2005; by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Hadlock posted:

Yeah once you bump up the kodi cache to > 200MB (I prefer 1GB) and kodi network allowance to 35mbps and there are no bottlenecks, the Fire TV is an amazing little machine. Great remote as well. Does 17GB 1080p movies no problem.

can I do this on my nexus player ? The boxes are on wireless N and I feel they run out of bandwidth faster than they should.

# ? Sep 1, 2016 04:54

Keito: Jul 21, 2005; WHAT DO I CHOOSE ?

jonathan posted:

can I do this on my nexus player ? The boxes are on wireless N and I feel they run out of bandwidth faster than they should.

Yeah you can alter buffering rules on any device running Kodi. It's pretty much a requirement for wifi usage.
http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO%3AModify_the_video_cache

Not aware of any speed setting so I'm not sure where that "35mbps" that Hadlock mentions comes from, because readbufferfactor ends up a multiple of a video's bitrate.

# ? Sep 1, 2016 06:30

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Hadlock posted:

Yeah once you bump up the kodi cache to > 200MB (I prefer 1GB) and kodi network allowance to 35mbps and there are no bottlenecks, the Fire TV is an amazing little machine. Great remote as well. Does 17GB 1080p movies no problem.

If your nexus use Kodi/xbmc then yes

The Wiki glosses over it, but by default Kodi has a bandwidth cap, here's my post from years past on the topic (towards the bottom). The magic word is "readbufferfactor". For whatever reason to prevent bogging down a university dorm room network and getting caught (I guess? :confused:

) by default Kodi only allows 35mbps to try and fill a gaping 1GB cache, instead of the 130mbps on wifi of the 1gbps (1000mbps) that a wired amazon fire tv has access to. On further inspection, they've updated it from default 1 to default 4, I set mine to 5 which will fill the cache in under two minutes. Without it, starting shows without letting it pre-fill tends to choke and get choppy.

http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO%3AModify_the_video_cache

note to future self, they're renaming these properties as of Kodi v17
http://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml#cache

Hadlock posted:

No you have to push out a modified config file to xbmc folder via adb it's not an advertised feature because the lag between when I figured out how to do it and when they approved my access to edit their wiki was longer than my interest in documenting how to do it

it's called advancedsettings.xml
code:
<advancedsettings>
  <network>
    
	<buffermode>1</buffermode>
	<cachemembuffersize>354857600</cachemembuffersize>
	<readbufferfactor>5</readbufferfactor>
  </network>
</advancedsettings>
The number in there is 354mb, because whatever number in there xbmc triples so you end up with ~1GB RAm used

The date on the file I pulled that from is 10/19/2014 and I haven't had any issues so I can say it's reasonably safe. The only issuse I've seen is a tiny warning box will sometime pop up if you pause and rewind saying the cache is full but I think it's a bug with the cache monitoring system not expecting the cache to be larger than X. The warning box doesn't have any impact though, just a false alarm.

You can re-push the advancedsettings.xml over and over with different numbers until you find one that works for you, probably even for the Fire TV stick by bumping it up to 128mb.

Hadlock fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Sep 8, 2016

# ? Sep 8, 2016 05:56

Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

Is there a decent cheap tablet that runs Kodi well? I've got Kodi set up on systems in the major rooms of the house already, and I'd love to have something I could stick to my elliptical trainer.

# ? Sep 18, 2016 21:17

GutBomb: Jun 15, 2005; Dude?

It's kind of old now but the nexus 10 android tablet ran it great and it's a 16:9 tablet which helps with video.

It's old so it should be something you could pick up really cheap. Newer android tablets would also work fine but the fact that this is cheap and 16:9 make it an ideal candidate.

# ? Sep 18, 2016 22:23

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 02:11

Hippie Hedgehog: Feb 19, 2007; Ever cuddled a hedgehog?

I just went and got a Lenovo Tab 2 A10-30 10.1". It's cheap as dirt and has a pretty good screen, and great battery life.
It runs Kodi well with the default skin. Admittedly I've only had time to check a couple of TV episodes but my H264 encodes seem to work just fine anyway.

Note: Wifi only. I'm assuming this is in-home streaming anyway.

Fake edit: Look at that loving price
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834331573&cm_re=Lenovo_Tab_2_A10-_-34-331-573-_-Product

# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > The Kodi/XBMC Thread - Watch things and stuff

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