Kodi Community Forum

Hi all,

I'm after any experiences people may have had running Kodi on a Pi4 and not using Libreelec or OSMC.

I currently use Kodi on a Shield as my daily driver and it works beautifully except for one thing. I have a large collection of Blurays that I have backed up to my NAS's that I would like to use Kodi to play with menus, while this works great for any Blurays with normal menus it obviously doesn't work with any that require Java.

As Android doesn't have a proper JRE and neither do Libreelec or OSMC I was thinking about installing a full blown Linux install with a JRE and then running Kodi on that.

Before I waste time re-inventing the wheel I was wondering if anybody else had tried something similar and what if any pitfalls they encountered?

I'm buying the Pi4 this weekend for delivery next week anyway, so if no one has tried this then I'm quite happy to spend the time trying different things, it would be extremely helpful though if anybody who has tried it could share their experiences, good or bad.

TIA

Mnementh

The only other OS I know for the RPI4 running Kodi as a full-blown OS is Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian).
It has run fine here, although I have no large Bluray files/videos here.

(2020-10-03, 19:44)Klojum Wrote: [ -> ]The only other OS I know for the RPI4 running Kodi as a full-blown OS is Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian).
It has run fine here, although I have no large Bluray files/videos here.

Thanks Klojum, for some reason I seemed to have a bit of a blind spot where RPi OS was concerned and didn't even consider it.

How have you found it for UHD and HDR playback? I currently play my UHD disks on my Xbox One X but I have the capability to rip those to my NAS as well if I can get them to play well on the Pi4. I'm not so interested in the menus on those as I only have films in UHD and I mainly want the menus for my TV Blurays.

(2020-10-03, 19:49)Mnementh Wrote: [ -> ]How have you found it for UHD and HDR playback?

That will require UHD and HDR hardware capable hardware, and I haven't taken that next-generation viewing-experience step. So nothing I can say on that.
Since you are going to purchase the RPi4 (at least 2GB I hope), you can be our test robot. Technically Kodi on RPiOS is not Team Kodi's build, it will be the Raspberry Pi team's compilation of Kodi, and whatever patches/changes they deem necessary.

I've ordered the 4GB version, should arrive Tuesday.

I'm one of the lucky ones not having to work from home though so the first time I'm really going to have to play with it will be Friday evening. Will give me plenty of time to have a read of the Raspberry Pi forums though I suppose

Arch ARM is a light-weight alternative to debian-based distros and offers lots of packages.

(2020-10-03, 19:38)Mnementh Wrote: [ -> ]I'm after any experiences people may have had running Kodi on a Pi4 and not using Libreelec or OSMC.

I am also running Raspberry Pi OS on a Pi 4 2GB, but mostly 1080p and below content.  Other options I looked at were XBian & LibreELEC, never tried either.  OSMC is supposedly around the corner for Pi 4 (not available yet).  But I personally didn't want LibreELEC, and have some objections with how much of a deviation OSMC made from Debian.  XBian I wasn't certain there was a significant userbase, and from what I could tell the project was abandoned at one point and restarted, so that made me a little uneasy.  I went with Raspberry Pi OS because it is mostly a vanilla Debian experience with some Raspberry Pi specific packages, and they are not really going anywhere.

Arch ARM, Ubuntu, and a few other OSes are also available for the Pi (see the Downloads link on the Pi Foundation website).  There is a great guide from Rascas on the Pi forums on how to setup Kodi on Raspberry Pi OS, but other than that I didn't find the Pi forums very useful.  Those forums have a huge influx of new users (since the Raspberry Pi is really education focused) and the responses from the regulars isn't always friendly.