[sdsnyr94]

Issue: Pre-loaded boxes.

Since all of the addons have already been installed, the proposed warnings/boxes will have already been bypassed. The user who purchases this box and has icefilms fail still has not been notified that they will not receive any support.... until they post on the forum.

I would say that you would need to post the disclaimer on boot.... maybe after a change in network address is detected AND 3rd party repository access is already enabled.

[un1versal]

You cant do jack about preloaded boxes except get them banned from listings and at that a mammoth task on its own.

The code that you propose presents any such warnings on boot can simply be compiled out. This is opensource software. Even if you blacklisted all such addons, again such code could be compiled out. moot point that and again beyond the scope of this idea which is people who are mostly sensible not to buy such boxes, dont cause themselfes unecessary issues and if they choose to do so, they are properly informed.

Preloaded box users will only get the sharp end of the stick, its everywhere already in the wiki in the forums, we all talk about it everywhere people will keep wanting to buy preloaded boxes and they clearly dont care.

All we can do about that is continue to by attrition to push these users out and keeping them out, by the ways and means its being achieved now.

In any and all cases I would think Kodi can only achieve a measure of success and effectiveness, total success is impossible.

[sdsnyr94]

The code that you propose presents any such warnings on boot can simply be compiled out. This is opensource software. Even if you blacklisted all such addons, again such code could be compiled out.

Actually most vendors are stupid, lazy and just out to make a quick buck with as little effort as necessary, I doubt any changes made are beyond the skin/xml level, thus if we do something in the C++ code I doubt many will bother making any changes.

This could at least help notify the end user who purchases from the 'lazy' vendor.

For the vendor who compiles the code out... wouldn't that be a violation of the GPL, and exonerate Kodi from any 'liability' (such as the Amazon fiasco)? Could you change that part of the code and still reference it as 'Kodi'? (Sorry... I am a bit uninformed on this matter.)

[un1versal]

You dont understand GPL that much is clear. quick 101, grab code, modify, distribute binaries and share source for changes, The only legal issues would be a trademark on Kodi name and logo (if they dont remove htrademarked items), but since they are already selling preloaded boxes with pirate addons I doubt they care about any such trademarks and even if they fail to comply with GPL who is going to deal with that?

And again these arguments only sidetrack the actual valid discussions. However such discussion they belong maybe elsewhere on other ontopic issues.

I knew this topic would get filled with these chase your own tail arguments.

[sdsnyr94]

Thanks for the clarification... what I meant was the Trademark side of things, and was not thinking clearly when I wrote that.

I'm not trying to sidetrack this discussion.... your proposal is an excellent one that may also have the side benefit of helping distance Kodi core from 3rd party add-ons, including piracy add-ons, which in turn could help how Kodi is perceived by people/companies in the future. However, my concerns about the pre-installed boxes are quite on-topic:

This request is literally for core, 7 out of 10 support requests are directly related to 3rd party stuff and most of those are now tvaddons / superrepo users by choice or by ignorance.

I am sure quite a few of those support requests start out with "I just purchased xyz box....". If you really want to decrease the number of support requests for these add-ons, there really should be some kind of 'Only official add-ons are supported' type notification that the end user could see, even if the stuff is pre-installed. (My recommendation about being after a network address change was the only unobtrusive time I could think of.)

Honestly, you can't tell me you expect the people who purchase these boxes to understand where to get support... most of them get the Kodi Box on ebay that is "Loaded" and plan on plugging it in and getting their free movies and television. The people purchasing these devices are generally the technologically challenged... if they had a clue how it worked, they would just install Kodi and install the add-ons themselves.

I'm looking at one ebay seller (Here) that has 113 views per day, and has sold 345 of these units. As you have said, preventing all of these sellers is near impossible... and because of this you potentially have 300+ new Kodi users just from this listing. It would be a great benefit if those users saw the same message as you have proposed.

Edit - My apologies.. I apparently missed Nate's comment that addressed this.

[un1versal]

Neither of those repos automatically imply piracy which preloaded boxes is all about, and as far as understand preloaded boxes you can avoid everything, thus its not even worth expending energy writing such code IMHHO

If I was doing it and could do it and was my call (which none of it is) I wouldnt simply because what you are proposing is a chase your own tail, cat and mouse forever and a day proposition.

Not only that, how would that work? Say it was implemented... Would you pop such warning at boot once every boot with yes and no dialog? would it be once every boot with no dialog just timeout?

If Im honest any of those scenarios I would remove the code myself even though I use no 3rd party addons.

[sdsnyr94]

Neither of those repos automatically imply piracy which preloaded boxes is all about, and as far as understand preloaded boxes you can avoid everything, thus its not even worth expending energy writing such code IMHHO

If I was doing it and could do it and was my call (which none of it is) I wouldnt simply because what you are proposing is a chase your own tail, cat and mouse forever and a day proposition.

Not only that, how would that work? Say it was implemented... Would you pop such warning at boot once every boot with yes and no dialog? would it be once every boot with no dialog just timeout?

If Im honest any of those scenarios I would remove the code myself even though I use no 3rd party addons.

If it was my call: On boot - IF 3rd party toggle is on AND IP address does not match what it previously was - Show Dialog with Accept / Disagree. Accept and you move along. Disagree and 3rd Party toggle disables until you go into settings and enable it... re-prompting dialog box.

(A side idea would be to also disable those add-ons in the process, not sure if there is a direct link between add-on and repo... but I am speaking more on a theoretical level here anyway)

The idea is that the IP you get from your network will be different than the reseller's, causing the dialog to come up. Yes, if I change the IP of my box I will get the dialog, but that should be a rare occurrence for most people... but even if it did pop up once or twice a reminder to not go to the Kodi forums for support of 3rd party stuff isn't a terrible thing.

Also, I really like the 'factory reset' idea... I just ran into an issue testing an add-on that was a pain in the ass to get removed once I decided I was not going to use it. I ended up wiping the sdcard (Rasperry Pi).

[un1versal]

Not doable. many people dont use static IP assignment on their network, So what nag these people to death then and continually disable their addons irrespectively?

Thats just cat and mouse and wasting energy on issues that go beyond the purview of the software IMO.

My pesonal view is:

What's been suggested so far by team members would suffice in educating people, and btw this IMO is all about education not about forcing or blocking anything or nagging people to death. All this has been discussed and my part in this sidetracked discussion ends here, there's nothing you or anyone can say that will convince me your suggestions is correct no matter how much good intentions may be behind it. This is software for all, that's OSS, if someone wants to restrict it that much or force blocking some addons for whatever reason then they can fork, rename it, release it and close the source. (we all know how successful those models are in protecting the software from the issues you so want to eradicate) which is to say not at all.

Where do you stop with that idea when your proposal fails? Rhetorical Q.

That's the point exactly, you would solve nothing at all, except you managed then to ruin a great software by the zillion attempts made to protect it. ( what man can do, man can undo just as easily).

Actually go use Boxee or something of the sort.

I support Kodi and this is my drive to making such suggestions carefully considered and leaving out certain topics because they to me are so frustrating and anti productive, ide do nothing else but waste air.

* un1versal laughs out loud.

[Ned Scott]

I don't like the idea of adding another setting that someone has to hunt down and flip before being able to use an option that is already in our UI.

Why not? the whole point is putting an extra hoop in place for users to jump through so we can point to out to anyone who asks that only add-ons in the Official repository can be installed by default, thus the only way a pirate add-on will get onto a system using a vanilla install of Kodi is for the user to have made a conscious effort themselves to allow this and then carry out the install themselves.

I made the same argument about just adding one extra click to show "Kodi.tv add-on repository" when people install by repo in v15, rather than flattening it when there is only one repo, and the idea was quickly shot down. I've since been swayed the the argument that it wasn't a good idea, and I worry about how far is "reasonable" to show a message or warning.

We shouldn't make it harder to install add-ons from a zip file. We're not trying to stop piracy add-ons from being installed. We're only trying to let people made an informed decision.

As for pre-configured boxes, I don't think this will help significantly. They'll make modified versions that remove the warning. Several venders already do this for various other little things. They know how to do it, and it will just turn into a silly cat and mouse game.

Actually most vendors are stupid, lazy and just out to make a quick buck with as little effort as necessary, I doubt any changes made are beyond the skin/xml level, thus if we do something in the C++ code I doubt many will bother making any changes. The only the exception might be the TVMC guys, but that would also be a good thing if it drives more vendors to use their fork instead of using vanilla Kodi as they might start marketing it as as TVMC box rather than a Kodi box, thus helping to distance ourselves from the piracy community.

This is what a lot of venders already do, except they're not using "TVMC" which is renamed. They're using versions that the community has made that preloads things. There are add-on authors "for hire" (and for cheap) that will help pre-configure Kodi installs for venders. That's how they come with add-ons reloaded or customized backgrounds. It doesn't take a C++ programmer to bypass something like this. It only requires that someone change a value in guisettings.xml or something like that.

While I haven't gotten an Android box lately, about a year ago I had two of them that were like that. The venders aren't smart, but they don't have to be smart to get past something like this. They just copy someone else's work or get some python scripter to do it for them.

So again, I think the goal here shouldn't be about stopping people, but just helping them make an informed decision.


On that note, I think we should just show a warning on-screen and not as a pop-up. I don't know how possible this would be without some code changes, but whenever you go into "install from zip" you then go into a unique list layout instead of the generic list layout, and that has a warning on-screen that is built into Confluence. It would always be there, it would be the kind of thing that venders wouldn't care about removing and it wouldn't already be "dismissed", and it wouldn't make installing from a zip any harder than it is now.

[sdsnyr94]

What's been suggested so far by team members would suffice in educating people, and btw this IMO is all about education not about forcing or blocking anything or nagging people to death. All this has been discussed and my part in this sidetracked discussion ends here, there's nothing you or anyone can say that will convince me your suggestions is correct no matter how much good intentions may be behind it. This is software for all, that's OSS, if someone wants to restrict it that much or force blocking some addons for whatever reason then they can fork, rename it, release it and close the source. (we all know how successful those models are in protecting the software from the issues you so want to eradicate) which is to say not at all.

How do you educate the users who purchase the pre-loaded box? Half of them probably couldn't even get into settings properly... and since all that shit is preinstalled they have no need to install a 3rd party repo, hence never seeing the 'On Screen warning'. My suggestion was the only way I could think of, off the top of my head, to make some sort of 'First Run' dialog box... and one that isn't depending on it being the First Run (vendor is doing that).

Sorry for wasting everyone's time.

[BartOtten]

Just want to mention that SuperRepo can not be compared to tvaddons so quickly. SR does serverside dependency checking and only creates 'official method' repositories (so no 'maintenance tools').

It's a full blown engine instead of a simple xml scraper/combiner. It does not blantly push the highest versions of addons (Frodo and Helix need many times different versions). It even has a virusscanner..... The other 'mass installers' are adapted versions of Kodi's add-on store: never made for creating repo's in the first place (hence their installers scrape websites)

I have tons of screenshots were SR is blamed as soon as it's mentioned in the debug log...but the user reporting the issue persists even after uninstalling SR. I'm not talking about the first days of SR when a lot had to be learned, I am talking about today with V7 just released based on 2 years of experience.

[un1versal]

Its hard to do a job like that efficiently (which is what I been trying to say), when they complain here or in official IRC channels about issues with their addons/boxes, by spreading the word far and wide blogging about it then its the time to tell them about it and that is already done by all team members and everyone involved in the community.

There's nothing else imo to be done, the best fight is to get listing removed from such places like ebay and Amazon who are the biggest parties supporting sales of preloaded boxes. (only official tema members deal with that and we can only point out such vendors to them. I imagine its a hard job to do.

As far as this goes best proposal so far is to handle this in the way unknown sources is handled like jjd-uk and nate suggested. Clearly everyone wants this in some way or another getting everyone to agree on whats best is probably the biggest obstacle here.

I disagree with SR its a great technology used to spread all manners of great and crap addons and unsupported or banned addons, as far as I know it used to modify addons and even many people asked to have their addons removed and many still there. I dont recomend it I dont defend it and it should be actively warned about until its developer sees some sense.

[BartOtten]

It used to do a lot of things, which it does not anymore at request of Team Kodi. Those things the other installers still do (make addons Gotham compatible-stuff).

Also I can provide a long list of devs who accepted SR after a conversation with me. I have invested much time in every pull request. There have been devs who began to rant as others did (aka: follow the stream)...only to be reminded they actually gave me permission :p Guess it's easy getting cough up in bashing.

SuperRepo has made mistakes and will probably do so in the future. But I can honestly say that it is at least a firewall between mad devs fighting using their addons and unaware Kodi users. That makes it ”the least worst solution”.

All that is left is hear say and history. Your ”afaik" is now updated.

[BartOtten]

Back on topic: a button like "untrusted" sources sounds like aplan to me. However, it would only bug users with a clean install of Kodi.....those people who don't buy the boxes as they know a bit about computers.

Gonna think about a better solution

[un1versal]

Well even users with clean install can install something from a repo (I wouldnt consider it an annoyance on a one off option enabling) or from a zip that may cause issues, doesn't have to be banned, this is the main idea behind this request the rest is a happy coincidence.