[brendon1981]

Hello experts, first time poster long time reader, I hope somebody can please help. 

I've just installed a fresh kodi from the ppa -- my os is a fresh install of ubuntu 22.04 64-bit on raspberry pi 4.  I look under gnome applications menu and kodi is not present.  I tried executing "kodi" from command line but it says "command 'kodi' not found, you can install it blah blah".  Although I have installed it.  On a previous fresh ubuntu 22.04 rpi install, I tried the ubuntu repository.  Kodi runs, and runs well and beautifully without lag,  but I have trouble with the iptv-simple-client which I can detail if anyone wishes, however I presume most would prefer to discuss the kodi ppa version. 

I have tried xbian and while it is great, I absolutely need a comprehensive effects processor (such as "pulseeffects") to be running when I use kodi.  Oh, also, when I use the ppa install, I cant install any of the other binary addons packages (such as kodi-pvr-iptvsimple), apt complains that there are unmet dependencies.  Of course, I can install these binary packages if I use the "kodi" package from the ubuntu repo, but then within kodi, the iptv-simple-client seems to do nothing.  My goal is to have kodi working on raspberry pi, with something like pulseeffects where I can oppose a "gain" with a "limiter" so intensely that there is no difference in volume between an explosion and a whisper (I like to go to sleep with the tv on), with iptvsimple client and an iptv-merger addon, on the raspberry pi 4.  I'm happy to use any os or methods or setups to make that happen.  Please help.  Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.  I'm sorry I'm not a good writer and my brain works in tangents. Paragraphing isn't in my skillset.

[Klojum]

@wsnipex ^^ Have a look please.

[jjd-uk]

RPi is not supported from the Team Kodi PPA you need to use a RPi specific distro. To get appropriate advice I'm moving this to the RPi forum.

[brendon1981]

Thanks Jjd.  I suspected as much.  I guess I'll try and do some learning and attempt to put something together myself.  Unfortunately, all the rpi distros don't use X, and i can't find out how to run other programs alongside kodi without it and a window manager (like openbox, for example).  It's a pity I think because I believe the pis to be powerful enough these days.  Thanks heaps for replying.

[jjd-uk]

I don't know the details, so there's probably others that can give you better advice, but I'll attempt a summary of my limited understanding

For RPi 4 Kodi usage then the best way is to use LibreElec, however that's a distro for soley running Kodi and so is stripped down to the bare minimum to run Kodi, although it does have docker built in to allow expansions to do other stuff. This will likely have the best video hardware decode support for the RPi on Kodi v19 Matrix. So likely doesn't fit your requirement to do other stuff.

Then there's OSMC which is also a Kodi specific distro, howwever it is built on top of normal Debian I think, so the normal Debian package managers can be used. No idea of the state of RP1 4 with OSMC.

With other distros you may be restricted to Kodi v18 Leia as v19 Matrix dropped the mmal video decode and moved to a more open source friendly V4L2, however V4L2 needs patches for ffmpeg to work properly. So for for v19 Matrix it likely needs to be a distro that uses one of the popcornmix branches, however due to the repo policies some of the big distro's have, they don't tend to use such branches.

[brendon1981]

Thanks Jjd, I was about to try out Osmc, and I stumbled across something else ....  ; tldr:  I got it to work using Xvfb, so I thought I'd post this in case anybody else has similar intentions.

So, for some background, on my Xbian setup, I had stopped the xbmc service from auto-starting, and I had installed xorg and openbox and pulseeffects with success, however, the problem I was having, is that pulseeffects won't even run in daemon mode without an X server (even though it doesn't display a window when doing this).  So I could "startx", use openbox, run pulseeffects, but I had to quit X to start kodi (kodi would start without quitting X but would not display (black screen), and I couldn't find anything online about trying to make kodi use X on xbian (who but me wants to do that!!!).  Anyway, with the use of the bash "&" operator, I can start pulseeffects using xvfb and be returned to tty (with xvfb still running) in order to start kodi.  Now, to figure out how to automate it all at startup and return to a seamless kodi box ...

It was this post (https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects/wiki...-Operation) that gave me the idea, although for a different program, totally worked with pulseeffects.  I really, really like xbian.