(2014-09-15, 12:02)Hedda Wrote: I think it unrealistic to ask large commercial companies like Netflix and Amazon to write custom addons for Kodi/XBMC or support any addon from third-parties, binary or not.
I believe that it is especially unrealistic to expect commercial companies who do not even have an public API to support or write their own addons for Kodi/XBMC.
I really think the only way forward for such commercial apps would instead be for Kodi/XBMC to add native support for a existing framework that they already use, like HTML5.
As if and when Kodi/XBMC could support standard HTML5 apps (with EME extensions for DRM) then any existing HTML5 app should in theory just work*
Again native support for HTML5 apps is already discussed in this other thread here http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=25
*Sure in reality any existing HTML5 app would probably not "just work", at least not perfectly without a lot of debugging and optimizations, but in theory HTML5 is HTML5.
With streaming services such as Netflix getting more content quicker, I think that it's inevitable that an an embedded HTML5 engine is integrated into Kodi/XBMC.
Build it and they will come 
HTML5 support does not fix one of the fundamental reasons behind media centers: people want a TV-like experience from their computer equipment. They want to use a simple, small remote control to look around and play their media and control the system. Even
if Kodi had HTML5 support, and even
if Netflix worked in it, you would still need to use a mouse and keyboard to navigate it, because web browsers don't handle non-traditional input methods well. This defeats the purpose of having a home theater PC in the first place.
Personally, I find it "especially unrealistic" that large commercial companies like Netflix and Amazon (who I am paying by subscribing, by the way) might
not exploit every possible (reasonable) avenue of delivering their content to me. Kodi has been around for MANY years, undergoes regular updates, and is a maintained product (unlike, for example, the Wii--and Netflix made a dedicated app for that). Tell me why they
shouldn't be willing to produce a plugin, or at the very least, an API so that others could develop an app or plugin?
With speech recognition (Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana, etc.) and touchscreens becoming so popular, I'm surprised more people aren't working on ways to integrate alternate forms of input into the web browsing experience. Right now, we have touch events in most modern web browsers, but that really only lets you browse the web using a mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen. Integrating a mechanism to handle alternative forms of input would not entirely address the problem I'm talking about, because Kodi would have to handle the hardware and interpreting whether it or the plugin should handle each event, but it would be a start.
Personally, I'd love to be able to write a little Python script so that when I say, "Beam me up, Kodi," it starts playing Star Trek via Netflix. We're a long way from that level of integration, though.
(2014-09-16, 17:56)Swifty Wrote: A nice solution to this argument would be to have Kodi as a Chromecast target - obviously no easy task, but I believe there is some open source project that has started work on this...
If you could 'cast' to Kodi as if it were a real Chromecast then surely the need for all these proprietary addons / scraping etc is void, since you can use the genuine Apple/Android apps on a phone/tablet and send to the big screen 
This would indeed be a partial solution, although I expect we would not be able to reuse any part of Chromecast: we would have to build everything from scratch (the iOS/Android apps, as well as the software to run in Kodi). I'd be very surprised if the evolution of Kodi didn't see something like this happen in the near future, though.
(2014-09-17, 02:57)crackers Wrote: Just buy a Roku and be done with it.
No, because then I can't write my own plugins to automate the video equipment in my home. (For example, thanks to a little scripting, Kodi automatically switches my projector to 3D mode when I play 3D content and back to normal when I'm done--does Roku do that?) There are very good reasons for Kodi (and OpenELEC, etc.) to exist and be popular. Not all consumers want the same thing as every other consumer on the planet.
