[harry fine]

Fell in love with Kodi on my Android tablet. I'm looking to cut my cable, and I'm amazed at the amount of content. Have a lot of questions, but just looking for high-level overview type answers.

1. I want to build a separate media service running Kodi. I have used LInux and Unix for years, so Linux to me sounds like the best way to go. Comments? I also have a Synology, might keep a lot of the downloaded media there. It is on the network as would be this machine.

2. I've read about OpenELEC as the OS. Is that a good option. I don't want to run it on Windows or Android.

3. As far as hardware, do you recommend building a PC, or buying one of the preconfigured media PC's. It has to be small, don't want it to take up a lot of space. I like the idea of an SSD, money is not really an issue for me.

4. Real stupid sounding question, where does the box have to be in relation to the flat screen TV, do these boxes have HDMI output, is that how you connect?

5. I assume I need an IR remote for the box, how does that work, is there a USB receiver it plugs into?

6. And finally, if I want to have an over the air tuner or some other tuner hook into this box and input into the Kodo media server, does that change the nature of the box, what would I need.

Thanks, know it's a lot of questions. Really appreciate your help.

[DaVu]

Hello and welcome to Forums

Good questions, i hope i can answer some oft them...

To 1+2:

If you know about Linux, i presume this might be the best way to go. I use xbmc on linux for years now and was never in need oft an other OS. I used OpenElec (OE), too. Contra of OE is the pro, too...it's a read only system. So if you don't have some noname or very rare hardware and don't want to install many things beside Kodi, I would give OE a Chance. It's not that flexible as a minimal ubuntu, but should work ootb.

Synology is fine. If you use Linux i recommend to use NFS as the protocoll. And do yourself a favour and don't use wifi. I recommend a wired connection.

To 3:

I build my own htpc with a miniITX board, a cpu , a bit of RAM (4GB) a HDD and an originAE Case. Might be a bit to big for your likings. If it should be small i would recommend the zotac boxes or the Intel NUCs (i3 should be enough).

To 4:

Yes...those NUCs or Zotac boxes have all HDMI outputs so that you are able to plug them directly to your TV if you want. If you have an AVR or any other sound system with a HDMI in, you are able to plug the box in there, too and passthrough the sound to your sound system. Depending on what it might be capable of, you are able to listen to DolbyDigital, DTS, DolbyTrueHD and DTS HDMA. But this depends on your AVR/sound-system.
If you don't have any device which plays the sound, you can plug it to the TV and be fine, too.

To 5:

Some oft those NUCs could have integrated IR receivers which can be used via LIRC iirc. There are guides for this here in Forums under the Linux help and support-section.
I fell in love with the flirc dongle. A little USB dongle which has an IR receiver and it can be used with EVERY remote in your house. It's easy to setup and is supported by any Linux (including OE) ootb. So no worries with flirc or creating keymap-files. But the guides for these are pretty good btw. So I think, you will geht that managed, too.

To 6:

I'm not sure what you exactly talking about. Can you explain a bit more please. Sorry, but I'm not a native english speaker .

If you're talking about having more than one XBMC client in your house and want to have the same media in all devices...well, you have your Synology and you can use a MySQL database for keeping them synced. But I don't have much knowledge about MySQL DBs...so I stop talking for now

Hope, I could help a bit.

Greetings
David

[harry fine]

Thanks so much for your reply. Question 6 was about how to add live TV (not streamed from the internet) to the media server. A lot of cities here in Canada have free over the air HD broadcasts of local channels. I'd like to be able to get a small OTA antenna, and a tuner of some sort, and plug that into the media centre. Does XBMC support external TV tuners?

[DaVu]

Live TV for Kodi works a bit different...

For Kodi you must have a TV card (pcie or USB...cable or sat...depending on what kind oft TV you can get). This card has to be plugged into a PC. In this PC you have to setup a tv-server as the backend with your other client and Kodi as Frontend. So Live-TV works a bit like a client-server-system. Google for TV-Headend and I believe you will find everything you will need. I dont use it, so i never set it up.

I suppose you can do this local on one client, but then you might not use OE, because you cannot install things beside Kodi in OE (except you build it yourself from source and implement the things you need, if you are able to).

[harry fine]

Thanks so much for your help.