Kodi Community Forum

Hi forum! I currently have a Mediaportal multi-seat server/client set-up throughout my home via gigabit ethernet. It's used for serving live TV as well as a large music and movie collection. I'm happy with the server PC, which also acts as the client for the main TV in the living room so I'll be keeping that, but the clients in the bedrooms are currently Windows based micro HTPC's based on AMD APUs. I chose those as clients because when I set this up a couple of years ago, they were the best option when looking at low energy use as well as enough processing power to run everything smoothly. The draw back is that the boxes are quite large, they're expensive and they have fans (though they are quiet). Yesterday I randomly came across a comment about Amazon Fire TV and side loading and XBMC, which certainly caught my interest and that eventually brought me here!

I thought I'd test out, so after 12 hours of network hell, I've finally got Kobi running as a client on one of the windows boxes and also an android Sony Xperia phone. I've not had much time to play around with it (my time was spent on network issues!) but from first impressions it's very impressive and seems to work without problems, even serving HD TV to my phone with no glitches. So I'm pretty much sold on getting rid of the Windows HTPC clients and replacing them with Amazon Fire boxes. Obviously I'll just buy one to start with and see how it goes, but hopefully some of you guys are running similar set ups and can answer a few questions that I have about the Fire TV boxes:


1. Can it play Live HD TV for hours on end glitch free?

2. Are the channel changes fast? (They're on my windows test machine and my mobile phone, even with "fast switching" turned off!)

3. How user friendly is the interface and how customisable is it? Can I set it so that launches straight to Kobi and can I change things like the menu background images and EPG layouts?

4. Will it play all recorded movie formats glitch/problem free?

5. How long does it take from switching it on, to having a TV picture - from both a "warm" start and a "cold" start?

6. Any other problems, annoyances or missing features I should know about? (bear in mind that my current Mediaportal clients, run totally problem free and look exactly how I want them to look).


If it help answer the above, they'll all be connected via wired gigabit and they'll all playback audio via stereo speakers on the TV's. There's around 4TB of movies and music on the server and around 150 TV channels all with logos.

I mention the last bit, because on my test set-up, there's a loading bar at the top on start-up where it downloads all the channel names, EPG, logos etc - hopefully there's a way to avoid that?

There are no such thing as a "bug free", "glitch free", or "problem free" software.

There are always bugs in any software, yes all, the question is how often you notice issues and how serious or annoying those issues are. Probably easier to answer your question if you ask about peoples general experience instead.

My own answer to that would be; Kodi 14 on Android is good enough for daily use in my experience. It is not as stable as say a Dreambox receiver but the WOW-factor of Kodi makes up for that in my opinion for my personal use. For more technical people who already have knowledge about HTPC I would however recommend Kodi on Linux over Kodi on Android, as Linux really is not as hard as you might think and it is more stable than Android.

If you already have micro HTPC's hardware based on AMD APU (also known as "Fusion") available then I would first just try installing those with OpenELEC instead of buying new devices

http://openelec.tv

Have no fear that it is based on Linux under the hood. OpenELEC is dead simple to install, configure, and use. It is almost like using a commercial receiver like Dreambox once setup-ed.

http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php/HOW-TO...g_OpenELEC

To try out you can simply install it on a USB-memory-stick if your HTPC allow booting to USB via BIOS settings, that way you can simply try it out without deleting your exiting installation. (Suggested tip is always to upgrade to the latest BIOS in your computer before trying out any new operating-system).

http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php/HOW-TO...tab=Fusion

I think that you will find that using OpenELEC on your existing HTPC's hardware based on AMD APU ("Fusion") will be just about as "bug free"/"glitch free"/"problem free" experience with Kodi as you are likely to get today.

(2015-01-15, 08:19)spacemanc Wrote: [ -> ]How user friendly is the interface and how customisable is it?

While Kodi might not have THE most user-friendly interface, yet, (it is however getting more user-friendly with each new release), but Kodi probably does have THE most customizable and flexible interface of any HTPC software out there.

Just try out a few different skins for Kodi and you will notice that skinners can make the interface can look and feel completely different from one skin to the next.

What is nice though is that the defaults are so good that you don't actually have to customize it if you don't want too, which I found is something is rather unusual in the world of HTPC software.


This wiki page is most likely the best start page for first time users of Kodi: http://kodi.wiki/view/First_time_user


All your other PVR related performance questions are probably better asked and answered in the PVR subforums or the general support forum instead of in the Android forum, that is because Kodi acts mostly the same on all platforms it runs on and your questions about PVR and Live or usability functionality are really not specific to Android or any other operating system, instead those are generic to Kodi.


PS: The new name for XBMC is "Kodi", not "Kobi".

I realise what you're saying, but I was hoping that the wording of my question might get more honest answers. I've experienced it before where people say something is awesome, but what they really mean is that it looks awesome and it works 95% of the time. For my TV's, they have to work 100% or it's not worth bothering. I've looked at NUCs and OpenELEC but it doesn't offer anything that I haven't already got. The whole idea is that from my tests, Kodi on android seems to work almost as well as my Windows based Mediaportal clients, but the Fire hardware looks like it's a far better compared with my HTPC's.

I guess I'll wait until they reduce the price again and then test one out. In the meantime I think maybe I should try Windows based Kodi on one of the clients, to see how we get on with it.

Try OpenELEC, it is certainly more stable than Kodi on either Android or Windows, or MediaPortal for that matter.

Nothing works 100% of the time, more realistic to aim for server industry standard at 99.8 % uptime/availability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability

99.8 % uptime/availability gives following periods of potential downtime/unavailability:

Daily: 2m 52.8s
Weekly: 20m 9.6s
Monthly: 1h 27m 39.5s
Yearly: 17h 31m 53.9s

http://uptime.is/99.8