What did you use before?
#1
I have been using XBMC/Kodi/SPMC/Openelec for several years now. Before it, I used the Boxee Box. Remember those?? They were EXECELLENT and did what the primary function od Kodi is. They allowed you to play back media files to the TV easily. DLink bought Boxee and screwed it up after introducing the Boxee Box. My in-laws still use the boxee box. I introduced them to it. They have mine, in addition to a couple others and use them extensively. Actually, before that, I used Western Digital's box. If have used variants of Kodi on PCs, Raspberry Pi, and a couple Android TV boxes.

Currently, I am using a Mi Box. At the end of the month, I am transitioning over to the Shield Pro.

I think the strife that made Koying move back to his own fork is and will be a mistake. Yes, Linux is an awesome environment for Kodi. The developers with the anti-android bias do not get it!! I want a box that will stream my own media, that will do netflix in full HD, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, the live stream services....all in one remote friendly/family friendly platform.

Android is no joke of an OS. Current hardware outperforms top of the line PC hardware from just a few years back.

I feel like there need not be OS bigots. I have numerous platforms...I like Kodi on all of them.
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#2
I used to use Xlobby.... great software (on Windows), and the only one I have ever found with builtin skin-events editor... no cryptic XML files to mess with Smile
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#3
Not sure what your question is, but android has previously involved so many hacks that aren't wanted in kodi's code.

Not sure what you mean about hardware. I recently bought a s905x android box. Kodi was awful on android, great on libreelec. Hardware is not necessarily tied to one os.
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#4
It is easy to say that there are hacks not wanted in the Kodi code base. What is a hack?? How do you qualify that? I know enough programming to be very dangerous. To you, is a hack something that doesn't use memory as efficiently as it ought to......to many old guys that started on Commodores and TRS-80s....that would be a hack in a derogatory sense. Is a hack a piece of code that uses another piece of code in an unanticipated manner?? That was something Java interfaces were supposed to cure..............I did say supposed.

Kodi is the property of the Kodi team. I appreciate that. The owners owe me nothing..not even a dirty look. It seems to me that rather than just have the split and no one knows exactly why, it would help to know what is meant by hacks. Koying obviously felt that his 'hacks' were solutions to problems. Are the 'hacks' more a reflection on the state of the Android platform or a reflection upon Koying's abilities with that platform?? (Koying...no offense intended.)

My platform of choice is Android TV. I have used OpenElec on a RPi2, on a PC, on a Fire, on a Chromebox. I am such that I am going to run a 'server' in the background to do the heavy lifting. I have a Shield Pro on the way. I want a family friendly front end for Kodi, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, A live TV service, light gaming, YouTube,and so forth. OpenElec on the Pi started bogging down under 3500 movies and a few thousand TV episodes. The Fire and the Chromebox were pains in the ass because the proper updates would screw up the 'hacks' I had to use to run Kodi on the device in the first place. The PC effortlessly ran it all, but the front end presentation was still crappy dropping out to Windows. Roku is nice, but doesn't do Kodi. It also doesn't do well with Emby or Plex and a large library nor does it allow for the customization of the user interface.

Kodi is an awesome program. I want to see it developed for all major platforms. Android/Android TV is a major platform. I would Suggest that there are more computers running Android than there are Windows or Linus PCs. The Galaxy S7 Edge in my pocket has more power than the servers the Home Shopping Network used as the backbone of it's Warehouse Management System a decade ago. That is impressive.It is a real shame that Sony and Microsoft have closed off the XBox and the Playstation. Apple is a culprit as well.
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#5
1. Learn C++
2. Get experience programming Android
3. Get familiar with the Kodi codebase
4. Submit PR's to git
5. Join Team

Seriously we have no Android dev at present. Koying is still a great friend of Kodi, but we need a lead (or any) android developer.
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#6
The issue with Android is, that the AV related APIs on anything below N suck and that most chipset vendors rather did their own AV implementations instead of properly supporting the official Android APIs. So in early Android days, manufacturers didn't have much of a choice other than writing custom drivers to provide features missing in the Android APIs. Also, some refused to use existing APIs and rather did their own thing as it seemed easier for them. Given that, you needed a shitload of vendor specific code to workaround shortcomings of chipset X on Android version Y or to get HW acceleration properly working. These workarounds had been injected into code partly shared with other platforms and at some point it became utterly cluttered and a change on one place could have unexpected behavior on another one. Once such an issue was found, another special case was added to the already unmaintable code with the potential to again break something else. All these workarounds injected into the shared codebase are considered hacks, that do nothing else than cause more and more issues in the end. Instead of adding more and more workarounds, it would have been necessary to rewrite the related parts to be able to keep platform/vendor specific changes away from the common shared codebase and to address for chipset specific configurations.

As this is not a simple/quick task to do and Koying didn't have the time but still wanted to fix bugs, he tried to fix them keeping the same old pattern by injecting workarounds (at that point considered hacks) instead of solving the architectural issue to fix the bugs at their origin and not trying to cure the symtoms over and over. This led to some conflicts between a couple devs that wanted to see the rework done instead (which unarguably would have been the most sane approach) and were in the end the reason why Koying decided to step away from maintaining Android.

After that, nobody had any idea which one of these hacks did what and we decided to rip out everything and only support official Android APIs. Luckily Google was willing to work with us to fix shortcomings/bugs in their old audio APIs and even implemented a brand new audio API for Android N. Also at least some of the chipset vendors (amlogic f.e.) are finally fixing their drivers to properly support the official Android APIs which makes them work fine without any workarounds or hacks needed. So in the end, our move to drop all hacks and only support official APIs was a huge benefit for the entire Android ecosystem.
Yes, users having bought cheap chinese boxes that will never see any firmware update, and thus never get the fixed chipset drivers from the manufacturer, won't be able to run newer Kodi versions because of this, but this is not really our fault, is it? You only get what you pay for, and Kodi 16 will still keep working on these devices.
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#7
Thanks da-anda.
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#8
please note that I simplified it a bit and certain bits are probably technically not 100% correct. But the gist is the same.

edit: also note, that even though we ripped out vendor specific workarounds, there are currently still some flaws in our implementation of MediaCodec, which can cause random issues. Luckily peak3D took the burden to rework parts of our MediaCodec implementation, so that the Kodi experience on Android will hopefully be as good as on other platforms as of Kodi 18.
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#9
XBMC on a chipped xbox was pretty much where i started, but i drifted away for a few years into Boxee land.
Before that it was Winamp all the way
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