One of my dad's co-workers got in his ear about running kodi and being able to watch 'everythang'. Now, from what I've been reading, doing this involved streaming through Plex on a desktop/laptop. Looking at his setup at home, I'm not sure how good an idea that would be (the desktop has a pre-Vista era Core2Duo and everything in the 2 story house has to run wirelessly off the standard Fios Actiontec router). I haven't looked into how much of a rabbit hole hacking a Roku would be, or how 'parent-proof' the end result would be either. In the end I'm wondering if buying a FireTV or Pi2 and running The Beast (or some other build of kodi) on that would be easier, both for him and for me (because I do not want to keep going over there or taking phone calls and texts to try and troubleshoot this).

Any thoughts or suggestions?

but I stopped messing around with XBMC/Kodi because:

A. I like ALL my shit in HD. A lot of the plugins that provide streaming content are SD or worse.

B. You have to deal with the plugins not working or having glitches due to random API changes or any other weird shit that goes on. You'll have to spend some time on the forums to find out what's going on.

C. Random instability with Kodi in general. It's not going to crash on you, but I went with Plex because I like my shit to just work.


All that to say when it works, it's amazing with tons of flexibility. I had a media center with Kodi that played all of my emulators, movies, music and a few PC games all with an amazing front end to navigate it.

When it doesn't work it's a pain in the ass. Too much bending and something is bound to break.

Getting a PC solves a lot of problems. Anything you can access from the web is there and unblocked. If they have a PC app you can run it. You can use a full size keyboard and mouse/trackpad for quicker entries.

You can probably buy a 3 year old Core i3 PC with Windows 7 on it off Craigslist for under $100 - if its a laptop just make sure it has HDMI or a DVI output.

I already need to set up a NAS/server for them, as my father seems to think his PS3 is a photo and video storage machine (long story). I'm not sure which TV they would want to put this on, but they don't have tons of room. And the less complicated the better, as I don't have time to do a whole lot of explaining

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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

Movies I need y'all bastids to see so we can discuss:

Five Star - https://goo.gl/jBHbVv
Appropriate Behavior - http://goo.gl/isCzTM
Ma

I was amazed at how hackable it was. I had Kodi running on it in a matter of minutes....
With that said...Kodi is gonna Kodi... lol... I wouldn't bequeath my folks with something like that because they'd be calling me to fix it....

Even if you don't do Kodi on it...I wholeheartedly recommend the Fire Stick...ESPECIALLY the new version that's coming out with Alexa built in.

Setting them up with Pi may be a bit much for them. A Fire Stick seems a bit more parent proof

I had a $50 gift card to bestBuy so it cost me like $60 out of pocket.

It's small.

The interface is okay - but Amazon keeps mixing things that cost money in with free things. There is a Prime only section but the interface doesn't give enough of a clue where you're at. Luckily you can protect yourself from buying something accidentally by requiring a PIN number.

I installed Kodi on it. Couldn't figure out how to get my Mac OR PC to allow SMB sharing with it (works fine on my PC Kodi) so I ended up installing SMB UP on my Mac. Once I did that then connecting to the shares work fine.

Most things played fine - the forward/rewind functions sometimes locked Kodi for a few minutes. I'd say if you start a movie and watch it you're fine. Pausing it and resume is fine too. But it may lock up if you forward/skip back for some files.

Also Kodi for Android doesn't seem to plat .WTV files for some reason. (From Windows media Center.)

I couldn't get VLC for Android to see any of my SMB shares.

I don't have a 4K TV but I have a 4K Dell Monitor. All the made for Amazon series available for UHD played fine at 4K 30z. They had "Funny Girl" the 1960's Barbara Streisand film in there too and no video appeared when I attempted to play it. I think they may have a few other 4K videos in Prime - but not much.

Issue: Sometimes I'd press a button on the remote and the Fire TV would do nothing - even the light that comes on the front when it senses a signal didn't happen - I see other people on the net saying they had the same problem too.

Issue: No "easy" way to have side loaded apps appear in the Interface. You have to go to Settings > Applications > All Installed Applications to launch it. (There are programs that can map buttons on the remote to run programs - but I'd be nicer if you could see them in the interface.)

I'll keep playing with it this weekend, but it looks like this thing is not a replacement for a HTPC - but could be a nice streaming box with the bonus of Kodi and VLC - but I think it has room for improvement.

The remote was super flaky. Apparently Amazon is revving the device and re-releasing on Nov 7th 2015 with fixes for it.

crazy illegal. but crrazy none the less. and stupid easy to install.
basically replacing my roku 3