Another "I f*&king HATE cable" Thread [Let's talk Kodi]
 

Having gone through the FireTV/Stick Streaming & I f*&king HATE cable threads. I am still left wondering what about Kodi tho?

For starters, I 'only' use netflix at this time off my PC and am looking into upgrading my living room situation. My 'new to me' TV is mostly used for my modded snes classic and old ass xbox360.

[HARDWARE]
I recently acquired an old Dell pc [dell inspiron 580] with a i3 cpu that doesn't seem half bad. 4GB of system memory and I'm guessing a 1TB hard disk. Upgrades I'd like to do... up the memory to 8GB, possibly an SSD for the OS, and a dedicated gpu if prices are correct. Nothing fancy, gtx750ti ? 950 if I can find one locally.

[NETWORK]
At the moment, using an old linksys 10/100 router. This will be gone soon as I have a nice gigabit asus picked out on amazon that doesn't look like it's going to crawl around on the walls at night. From the router in the room, planning on running Ethernet over AC adapters out to the living room. From there, out of the wall and to a network switch for allthethings.

[SOFTWARE]
Windows? Linux? Which would give me a better experience with PIA VPN in use? It looks like... the Linux distro may be the way to go as it will use less resources and possibly use gpu hardware acceleration.

Linux gurus, thoughts?

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Other Kodi users, what has your experience been like so far?

I have no advice for you as far as Kodi goes.

I am a Hulu / netflix / youtube red user. I use my steam link with regular ol windows, i think it works great personally. In fact, i just use my full liquid cooled ryzen gaming system for everything, why have multiple PCs? You need a GOOD router, especially if you decide to go wireless.

I am interested in kodi though, if you do it let us know how it is.

Edit*

Been reading, I guess ISPs are blacklisting people who are using it if they find out and it's extremely slow with all the users using it currently.

I tested the Kodi android app on my phone last night and was able to watch about 30mins of the movie 'Hackers' as a test before getting stuttering/buffer issues. Maybe ISP throttling? I was not using a VPN at the time. Usually, when using torrents on a VPN my speed is never an issue.

Torrenting is different from streaming from a very very very far away remote source. I like Kodi as a program/hub/OS, but as a thing to use to access far remote files, it's frustrating trying to find a good source so i stopped trying.

I messed around with a lot of this stuff, Kodi, Plex, Win7 Media Center, Sling...right now I'm paying $40 a month for YouTube TV and it's great. Not free, but good channel selection (for me), DVR functionality included, decent UI, and the best stability and performance of any streaming service I've tried.

That said, if you're completely committed to 100% free, it can be done...but it's going to take some work. For me, the trade-off in time and effort wasn't worth it.

I use Kodi when I want to find a specific movie or TV series to watch. I'm running Kodi on an old Dell with an i3 processor, on Windows 7. My network is nothing special, and the Dell is hard-wired, of course.

When it comes to performance, once I can find a stream that actually works, I don't have a problem with buffering. The main issue is finding a stream that actually works. Typically, the newer the movie or TV show, the hrder it is to find a working stream. That's my main issue with Kodi.

I'd be interested in hearing if others are having similar issues.

Good to know.

I guess at this point I should look into making it just a HTPC with Kodi's addons. Transfer movies that I have over to those drives on the i3 and just have it as an option.

If I don't go this route, it's just going to become a dedicated DOOM 2 server to play around with. :rofl:

I used to run Kodi on a FireTV, but dropped it in favor of Netflix+Amazon Prime + HBO all running on Amazon FireTV box. Best $30-35/month ever spent on entertainment. Between the three - there is always something to watch, no commercials, fully legal, off-the shelf, supported, etc etc. Looks and sounds superb on a 70" TV with massive Klipsch Reference 7 series speakers.

I would strongly recommend looking into running kodi on small all-in one purpose built Android box than full Win/Lin OS. A lot less hassle, works better, lower power usage, small and unobtrusive. You can buy pre-configured FireTV with kodi or load it yourself. I did have issues getting PIA VPN on FireTV as the app for Android was wonky, but ended up implementing VPN on the NAS (works great via built-in VPN app) and then using it as the gateway for KODI. But if you do that, than most Amazon services will see that you are using VPN and will block native content....so... yeah. Doing Kodi with "streaming/torrent" was a hassle - some sources would go offline, sometimes quality would suck, buffering issues due to source servers/pipes not keeping up.

I have been using KODI since 2013 or so, back when the addon "mashup" wasking. Over the last 5 years I have had to switch up which addons I used because some just fizzle out and quit pulling sources. The latest addon I found to be reliable and have good sources is Neptune Rising.

As far as buffering goes, I have an Nvida Shield hard wired to my router and 120+mbps internet and will still get stuttering on some HD sources. I have a feeling it is the source end causing this,so I generally just use a SD source - 9/10 times its clear and watchable. Once in a while a SD source will play a 360p resolution crappy audio stream but I can usually just grab another source and have better quality.

I have FireTV with Kodi. I also have Terrarium TV and Morpheus TV for movies. Motor Replays on Kodi will give you F1 recordings. If you go on Troypoint.com, it will give you tutorials for all these install. You have to have good ISP service, I have Google Fiber! Google Fiber ROCKS!

Thanks for the info guys. It has crossed my mind to just pickup a FireTV Box if I want to mess with Kodi as it works just fine in that environment. It would be way cheaper than upgrading this i3 computer with parts.

2nd Generation FireTV is better than the 3rd generation if you can find one. Based on the review on Troypoint.com

Cool site, do you have a link to that article?