[StarBurns]

Sorry if this is a stupid noob question. I’ve tried to Google it of course. A while back I was able to play Cody streams through VLC on my PC. Is there any way to do this on a raspberry pi with Kodi. I’m using LibreElec Kodi ( The only raspberry pi 4 option that I know of) and I’m not even sure how to get into the command line. I’m sure I can look that up but I know what I’m asking is that can I set up VLC to be the player engine in Kodi, and it would it retain all of the navigation features?

I just seem to have a lot of problems with the built-in Kodi player. I play a lot of videos made by amateurs who may not be the best at encoding and I seem to have more problems with Kodi playback than I ever did with the Boxeebox or popcorn hour or even the WDMC player. Particularly WMV files do not play all that well. And while I can’t imagine WHY people are still using the WMP7 and 8 encoders, they clearly still are.

As an aside given how amazingly agile the VLC player is, and it is open source, why isn’t it the main core player in Kodi to begin with?

Thanks

[FXB78]

No you can't use External players with LibreELEC. Might be worth giving Raspbian a try, that might let you do this, or even solve the problem without an external player.

[rascas]

It won't work in Raspbian either.

[DaVu]

Oh, that's intesting, rascas. Why not?

[rascas]

Well, I am not exactly sure why but I think it is a mix of the way the Raspberry Pi works and the way it is generally compiled. I am not a programmer, my C++ knowledge is very limited.
Kodi on Raspbian is compiled the same way as it is on LibreELEC.
RPi 0 to 3 uses specific code for rendering (correct me if I am wrong) and uses its Broadcom proprietary drivers for it. It only works fullscreen. If Kodi is compiled with X11 support, like it is generally done on most Linux systems, like Ubuntu x86 for example, hardware video decode doesn't work, at least I never found a way to make it work. That is something that I really would like, since the first RPis, that would make it possible to use it in windowed mode, with hardware video decode.
RPi 4 uses open source drivers, Mesa, but it uses GBM instead of X11. So it is more or less the same as previous RPi versions, you cannot go windowed mode.
In all RPis versions, using an external player doesn't work. If you compile Kodi with X11 support, it will most likely work, but you will loose hardware video decoding. I believe GBM does not support this (external player) on any platform, not even on x86. For me, and most of the people I believe, external player support on the Raspberry is useless because Kodi+ffmpeg has better video support than VLC. And better performance.
What it would be great was if the RPi/Kodi supported X11 with hardware video decoding.

[popcornmix]

GBM/KMS only supports one "DRM master". Other applications can only use the screen when going through this master.
X is normally the master which allows other apps to display windows, but only in an efficient way where the contents of windows have to be copied and converted.

Kodi is launched through a wrapper that uses chvt to switch X away from being the DRM master and allow kodi to become it.
Without kodi supporting relinquishing being the master when launching the app and reacquiring it afterwards then launching another gui app isn't possible.

There is little reason to do this as kodi with an external player sucks (you lose the standard method of control, the kodi gui, integrated subtitle download, audio/video settings)
and kodi is generally a more capable player than anything else. If you have a problem playing a file with kodi it's probably best to report that.