Proposed New Appliance: Kodi

Project Discussion Appliance
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Your interest and involvement

Just interested in having it as it would be nice to move all infrastructure to Ubuntu (I’m currently running OSMC on a Pi. Sidenote: OSMC does not officially support booting from USB/external SSD. Given the speed/reliability improvements, this would be a huge plus if possible as an appliance)

Audience

Home users

Software considerations

Kodi is a free and open source Media Center. There is a mir-kiosk-snap from Alan Griffiths (https://snapcraft.io/mir-kiosk-kodi)
As for other snaps I’m not sure.

Hardware considerations

The appliance should work on ARM and x86. Only an external monitor and sound out is needed for normal usage. Support for (USB) remotes would be nice, but is not a requirement

Security considerations

No idea

Privacy

https://kodi.tv/kodi-privacy-policy

Maintenance considerations

Should use existing maintenance infrastructure as kodi debs are available from Ubuntu.

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This is a great idea. Kodi is a perfect example of the kind of install-and-forget application you want behind the TV! :smiley:

I will talk to Alan Griffiths, and see what we can do about getting this work upstreamed. Thanks for the suggestion!

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Hi,

I’m happy to help, but be aware there are still issues to be addressed for ARM systems in general and with the 18.04 i965-va-driver (using base: core20 doesn’t work with my current snapcraft plugins).

Here’s the contact I had with upstream: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=347974

Best,
Alan

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In the interest of enabling progress, I’ve tried using base: core20 and the Ubuntu archive instead of using a plugin to access the Kodi PPA.

The 20.04 archive has the advantage of a working i965-va-driver and builds for arm64 and armhf.

It has the big disadvantage of no “repository” for add-ons. (And no i386 build.)

The branch is here: https://github.com/MirServer/mir-kiosk-kodi/tree/core20

[UPDATE]

The lack of “repository” was a transcription error, I’ve fixed that in the branch.

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Hi everybody, thank you for considering making a kodi appliance. I see that the core20 branch has been deleted - maybe because of this PR. Anyways, good to see some activity on the GitHub repo. :heart_eyes_cat:

@alan_g, could you maybe provide a brief README in the source repository or give some brief instructions here on how to test this (e.g. on a rpi4)? Thank you very much!

Btw, the link to the privacy policy has changed: https://kodi.tv/about/privacy-policy/

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It’s the snap linked above:

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FYI here is an alpha quality appliance image that uses the full HW decoding capabilities of the Pi (i have been waiting for the raw-input interface to land in snapd to move on with this, the next snapd release is supposed to finally have this interface)

i use it at home with the vdr-server and oscam snaps to watch sattelite TV

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