2016-02-05, 18:05
My family is interested in Kodi. Is the following draft email accurate?
Here is a little brief, for those of you that are interested, on what I know and have done with Kodi so far.
More and more people are finding their cable fees to be getting too expensive and as a result this has generated a growing Kodi community.
There are a lot of new buzz words so I may unintentionally misinterpret some things.
I have successfully downloaded and installed Kodi on a Windows 10 PC, an Android tablet and a Windows tablet. Like many others, Kodi can add video, music and picture files to its library and play them back.
So I’m at the spot where everything works and I can play movies or TV from my PC or tablet. The next step was to try and get Kodi to play from my computer to my TV. I have a dumb panel TV feed by a smart WI-Fi disk player. Unfortunately, all that I can get on my TV through the disk player is the Kodi icon, but since I’m not playing an actual movie/TV file instead I’m streaming nothing else shows up.
If your computer/tablet happens to have DLNA, you might be able to stream the info to your TV/disk player, but I don’t have this capability. My tablet does not have DLNA, but it does have a micro HDMI output so I hooked up a cable from the tablet to one of the USB connections on my TV. This did route the video to the TV and I was able to play 2 episodes of a TV series.
Now the bad news, after watching the 2 episodes the buffering became too slow and I could only get jerky playback. (This has nothing to do with the cabling to the TV as it occurs on the tablet as well.) The most obvious would be the Wi-Fi, but Netflix always worked ok with my Wi-Fi. There may be a number of reasons for this, but the most obvious solution would be to eliminate the Wi-Fi and use a direct Ethernet connection (i.e. the one everyone used before Wi-Fi came along).
With my current setup there doesn’t seem to be any way of doing this, however, I found one solution that looked simple, easy and inexpensive - Raspberry-Pi2. A stripped down computer the size of a credit card with an Ethernet and USB ports designed for video stuff. See Amazon.ca - CanaKit Raspberry Pi 2 Complete Starter Kit with WiFi (Raspberry Pi 2 + WiFi + Preloaded 8GB SD Card + Case + Power Supply + HDMI Cable + Guide)
I move my Wi-Fi/modem from my study to the TV in the living room, connect the Ethernet from the Wi-Fi/modem to Rasberry-Pi2, and connect via the USB ports to the TV.
The Raspberry-Pi2 should arrive in the next week.
Here is a little brief, for those of you that are interested, on what I know and have done with Kodi so far.
More and more people are finding their cable fees to be getting too expensive and as a result this has generated a growing Kodi community.
There are a lot of new buzz words so I may unintentionally misinterpret some things.
I have successfully downloaded and installed Kodi on a Windows 10 PC, an Android tablet and a Windows tablet. Like many others, Kodi can add video, music and picture files to its library and play them back.
So I’m at the spot where everything works and I can play movies or TV from my PC or tablet. The next step was to try and get Kodi to play from my computer to my TV. I have a dumb panel TV feed by a smart WI-Fi disk player. Unfortunately, all that I can get on my TV through the disk player is the Kodi icon, but since I’m not playing an actual movie/TV file instead I’m streaming nothing else shows up.
If your computer/tablet happens to have DLNA, you might be able to stream the info to your TV/disk player, but I don’t have this capability. My tablet does not have DLNA, but it does have a micro HDMI output so I hooked up a cable from the tablet to one of the USB connections on my TV. This did route the video to the TV and I was able to play 2 episodes of a TV series.
Now the bad news, after watching the 2 episodes the buffering became too slow and I could only get jerky playback. (This has nothing to do with the cabling to the TV as it occurs on the tablet as well.) The most obvious would be the Wi-Fi, but Netflix always worked ok with my Wi-Fi. There may be a number of reasons for this, but the most obvious solution would be to eliminate the Wi-Fi and use a direct Ethernet connection (i.e. the one everyone used before Wi-Fi came along).
With my current setup there doesn’t seem to be any way of doing this, however, I found one solution that looked simple, easy and inexpensive - Raspberry-Pi2. A stripped down computer the size of a credit card with an Ethernet and USB ports designed for video stuff. See Amazon.ca - CanaKit Raspberry Pi 2 Complete Starter Kit with WiFi (Raspberry Pi 2 + WiFi + Preloaded 8GB SD Card + Case + Power Supply + HDMI Cable + Guide)
I move my Wi-Fi/modem from my study to the TV in the living room, connect the Ethernet from the Wi-Fi/modem to Rasberry-Pi2, and connect via the USB ports to the TV.
The Raspberry-Pi2 should arrive in the next week.