[mrmoustache]

Hi all,

First of all, I'm quite new to the whole media center thing and I've researched the issue extensively but I'm not sure what keywords to look for so I always end up with articles that don't really answer my question. Apologies if this has already been discussed.

I have quite a capable workstation (win10, i5 4460, gtx1060 6gb, 16gb ram) hosting 4k and 1080p movies and recently bought a 4k smart tv. Only those 2 are not and can't be in the same room.
I also have a gaming laptop (win10, i5 6300hq, nvidia 960m, 8gb ram) with kodi 17.6 that accesses the files on the workstation over ethernet and is hooked up to the tv via hdmi.
Doing some tests it seems the laptop has a hard time decoding 4k, sound is ok but I can see some jittery motion that is very annoying. For now I'm only testing 4k h265 files. The workstation though has no problem playing back the 4k content locally with kodi.

So I would like my workstation to do the decoding and only stream that to the TV, which is connected to LAN via ethernet. I would prefer not connecting the laptop to the tv and just getting the video to the tv via ethernet.
What would be the best way to do this?

[DarrenHill]

Kodi doesn't transcode, so you'd have to redo all of your media into a suitable format for the laptop.

A better solution might be something like Plex which does transcoding, with the server on your workstation and a client on your laptop for the playback. There are also add-ons for Plex in Kodi, so you can still use Kodi as the front-end and Plex as the source.

If you want the TV itself to play back, then you'd need some kind of installation on the TV or something connected to it. If the TV has an Android based OS then you can maybe install Kodi there, but the chances are you'd run into the same (or worse) issues than you do with the laptop. Basically Kodi is designed to playback to a device it's on or directly connected to via HDMI, so playback over Ethernet isn't really an option.

[mrmoustache]

Many thanks Darren. I will look into plex
Too bad though, I love Kodi!

[DarrenHill]

If you want Kodi as a front-end, there's the PlexKodiConnect add-on which lets Kodi read from a Plex database, but it's unofficial from us as it by-passes the Kodi database and so isn't allowed in our official repo (but it's perfectly legit aside from that).

There is also the official Plex add-on in our repo, but that acts a little more like an external player and whilst integrated with Kodi you don't get the look and feel of it (the add-on has its own screens etc which look more Plex than Kodi).

[mrmoustache]

Thx, I'll look into plexkodiconnect. Tried plex yesterday and I found out that hardware acceleration is a premium feature after streaming 4k and FHD to the tv with even worse performance than with my laptop... Oh well more hours of tweaking and tuning then