I'm new to Kodi and unclear on some stuff.
What I *want* to do is run Kodi on a system with attached storage for my media and then stream that media to various client players around the house. A web client is more than ideal as is a client for an Amazon fire tv box.
Is that a possible thing? Any howto's?
@
rbf072858
Kodi is not a server. It is a player.
You would set up Kodi on all your hardware devices and connect to your medial collection via some network protocol such as SMB. Each Kodi instance would then be able to access the media files for playback.
Yeah, I just got the fire tv playing movies via smb... Which is OK, but not optimal in my opinion (what can I say, I'm a protocol bigot).
Got any suggestions for a server? Do NOT say Plex. That's why I started this journey.
Unfortunately it is more the Plex model than the Kodi one.
What you can do is set up a file store with your media somewhere on your network, and then share that via SMB or NFS to the other players around the house running Kodi. Plex is the server/client model that you imply, whereas Kodi is the source/player model which isn't quite the same thing.
It is of course perfectly possible, with a suitable device, to have the file store and one of the Kodi players be on the same device. A NUC or a HTPC for example could fulfil both roles.
It is possible to use Kodi somewhat in that way via sharing a
MySQL (wiki) database for watched states or stuff like that, or using 3rd party solutions like Emby within Kodi.
Emby would have been something I would have also suggested.
In case you don't know (@
rbf072858 ), Kodi is also able to act as a UPnP server/client. It's probably not exactly what you are searching for, but you are able to use one Kodi instance and from that select a movie/video and use the "Play with" contex menu to send the video to another UPnP client. That client can also be a Kodi instance or anything else UPnP/DLNA capable as long as Kodi lists it.
IIRC external subtitles is not supported via UPnP in case you need that.