[gibxxi]

I've been a user since the very beginning running the original XBMP (before it became XBMC) on the original Xbox so I'm very much an old school man with everything rip to files and stored on network storage. I don't see that changing either as quite frankly I do not trust the content and streaming providers from having what I want when I want, as you hear all the time about stuff being removed from Amazon/Netflix etc. So long may Kodi continue for stick in the muds like me who detest the move to streaming so have zero interest in it, besides I barely have enough time as it is to watch or listen to my 90TB media library so who needs streaming

Excellent point jjd-uk.

Streaming services offer up what they think will "make money". If it's niche, indie, or just not well regarded by the masses, and because of that, doesn't make money, don't be surprised when that streaming movie or TV show from 5 years back, that you suddenly have an urge to re-watch is no longer available because the streaming service your paying (over the odds for, in all probability), has pulled it to make way for something that "sells" better.

People are in general; naive, lazy, and in some cases downright stupid. This modern focus on moving away from physical media and relying exclusively on streaming services is an example of all three traits (IMHO). if not deliberately, by natural progression. Something we are very likely to regret once the "choice" on how we aquire our media is no longer ours to make, because all other options have been discontinued / rendered obsolete.

Dan / Gib.

[debennett2]

I've been a user since the very beginning running the original XBMP (before it became XBMC) on the original Xbox so I'm very much an old school man with everything rip to files and stored on network storage. I don't see that changing either as quite frankly I do not trust the content and streaming providers from having what I want when I want, as you hear all the time about stuff being removed from Amazon/Netflix etc. So long may Kodi continue for stick in the muds like me who detest the move to streaming so have zero interest in it, besides I barely have enough time as it is to watch or listen to my 90TB media library so who needs streaming

Excellent point jjd-uk.

Streaming services offer up what they think will "make money". If it's niche, indie, or just not well regarded by the masses, and because of that, doesn't make money, don't be surprised when that streaming movie or TV show from 5 years back, that you suddenly have an urge to re-watch is no longer available because the streaming service your paying (over the odds for, in all probability), has pulled it to make way for something that "sells" better.

People are in general; naive, lazy, and in some cases downright stupid. This modern focus on moving away from physical media and relying exclusively on streaming services is an example of all three traits (IMHO). if not deliberately, by natural progression. Something we are very likely to regret once the "choice" on how we aquire our media is no longer ours to make, because all other options have been discontinued / rendered obsolete.

Dan / Gib.

This isn’t a “one or the other” situation, however. I hoard data like the rest of us.

[gibxxi]

Agreed. But don't look at where the problem starts, look at where it ends. That's the future.

I guess I'm taking after my old man in my mindset (looking at the golden years and cursing modern technological progress - he's a luddite). We all embrace the technology of our generation(s). A wise man once said "Master  technology, or be mastered by it." I guess I'm just old-school and by definition against all this rapid progression. But like others I do view subscription-based services with a high-level of cynicsm and mistrust.



Dan / Gib.

[PatK]

the golden years and cursing modern technological progress - he's a luddite

What do you have a record player for? friends would ask; at one point I took my 350 vinyl record collection (accumulated from the time of being a paper boy) to a shop to dispose, was offered $40 for the entire bundle... and of course he would sell me the Beatles 'white album' again on CD. I guess I value my old vinyl collection, and now I hear that vinyl is on track to outsell CD's... who would've thought. I can acquaint with your old mans mindset, brings memories of 8 tack, VHS, Beta, cassette tapes, 45's, laser disks, and all the media I used to hoard, it's sickness brought on by parasites that take advantage of a human weakness. Well that might be a tad strong language, but indicative of the road ahead.

Kodi takes back some of that control. and puts it back in our hands, of course not without some effort.

[gibxxi]

the golden years and cursing modern technological progress - he's a luddite

What do you have a record player for? friends would ask; at one point I took my 350 vinyl record collection (accumulated from the time of being a paper boy) to a shop to dispose, was offered $40 for the entire bundle... and of course he would sell me the Beatles 'white album' again on CD. I guess I value my old vinyl collection, and now I hear that vinyl is on track to outsell CD's... who would've thought. I can acquaint with your old mans mindset, brings memories of 8 tack, VHS, Beta, cassette tapes, 45's, laser disks, and all the media I used to hoard, it's sickness brought on by parasites that take advantage of a human weakness. Well that might be a tad strong language, but indicative of the road ahead.

Kodi takes back some of that control. and puts it back in our hands, of course not without some effort.

I grew up in the 80's Pat. However I didn't get my first computer (C64c) until I was 12. Have had many frustrations with cassette and VHS tapes over the years, spent oodles of time on head-cleaning routines, etc. Hell on the C64, one of my favourite games of the time (Space Crusade by Gremlin Interactive) took a full 45 minutes to load from inserting the cassette until mission start, and if the azimuth on the datasette wasn't "perfectly" aligned, the second side of the tape, containing the mission data, wouldn't load, and you'd have to reset the computer and start all over again. Oh the joy!

I've embraced newer technology like CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, etc. But I still have a means of playing my old music cassettes. I still have a set-top-box with an integrated VHS player/recorder to play back my old tapes, and my disk media (which is now considered obsolete) pretty much fills up my home. Hell, I still have a USB 1.44MB floppy disk drive attached to my main PC, "just in case" I should need to pull some old data off one of the many boxes of floppy disks I have stored here from my college days.

Newer technology undoubtedly makes things simpler, and easier. I don't question that. But one example that sticks in my mind, and was the motivation behind earlier comments, is that streaming services (content availability aside) are convenient only so long as you have the means to use it. Should your internet connection develop a fault, or go down for some reason, then you need to have a Plan-B otherwise your options are zero. Physical media as well as locally stored (ripped / encoded or otherwise) is a Plan-B. Relying on internet streaming at the expense of all else is not (IMHO). That's before you even get into the availability concerns I highlighted earlier.

We here on this forum are probably not representative of the ordinary masses. We have an interest in not only the software elements of the "setup", like Kodi, but also in the underlying technology that drives it. We all take days, weeks, months even, organising our media collections so they can be the best they can be. Use tools like Ember, MediaElch, tinyMediaManager, etc. to get our video-based media in top shape. Make sure our music is tagged correctly in MusicBrainz Picard, submit entries to online services not only for our benefit, but for others who share the same interests in the media we like. It's a labour of love. Everyone's needs are different, people are different. My mother used to have a fridge magnet, it read as follows:

"Use what talent you possess, the woods would be very silent, if the only birds to sing there, were those that sang the best."

That saying has stuck with me into adulthood (I'm 44 today BTW, lol). The "talent" aspect aside. It's alluding to the fact that  everyone has differing skills, needs, desires and priorities. Kodi covers all the bases pretty well as it is. It's being worked on by a team, who are  themselves community members, means their passion is going directly into the project. They don't do this for fame or fortune, they do it because they desire to do so, for the benefit of everyone. We would all do well to remember that.



Dan / Gib.

[debennett2]

Newer technology undoubtedly makes things simpler, and easier. I don't question that. But one example that sticks in my mind, and was the motivation behind earlier comments, is that streaming services (content availability aside) are convenient only so long as you have the means to use it. Should your internet connection develop a fault, or go down for some reason, then you need to have a Plan-B otherwise your options are zero.

I think we have similar thought processes but I've FINALLY rounded the corner and realized there's something to be gleened from the new stuff, particularly Youtube (no one can tell me they don't enjoy some Youtube content), Netflix to a slightly lesser degree, and streaming tv services (instead of cable). I have my 60TB of disk space on my NAS array which I am getting close to needing to invest back into again to expand (eek). 5k+ of movies and countless television shows. I get that too. Obviously or I wouldn't invest all that cash into it. 

I'm 44 today BTW, lol

Me too.....ugh.

[debennett2]

Resurrecting this as V20 Nightlies are a thing now. Is there any hope for an internal browser in this release?

[PatK]

Is there any hope for an internal browser in this release?

Hope is eternal... there is always hope. But the chances are slim atm, what do you need an internal browser for? Think I recall some add-on that gave functionality to Chrome, likely depreciated, but open source would give anyone a head start.

Think your post would be best handled in the 'features request' area.

[scott967]

I've used Chrome launcher.  It's an alternative but in most cases watching through browser subjects you to ads + tracking, if that matters to you.  I can't really see Kodi becoming a Roku box, as open source doesn't really fit in with that business model.

scott s.
.

[Takezo36]

Just add my 2cents.
I do use kodi mixed with streaming (netflix, youtube) and local media and love that i get the same ui experience for all of those. However what throws me off kodi and into the tv apps is the "slow" ui experience. Because everything is directories it's always click youtube ... wait blocking loading ... click on subscriptions ... wait blocking loading... click on channel ... wait blocking loading...click on the video ...wait blocking loading... video. While the youtube tv app is by far not perfect but the "fluidity" of the ui is much better. 
I don't know if that would be possible but my biggest wish for the future would be to get a more fluid ui interaction with plugins. I don't know ... allow async loading of the items, preloading of next folder ... something like this.

[IamDan]

Personally i see kodi as my own streaming service! I have thousands for movies and shows and use it for live tv.

[Daydream]

I'd like to share what went through my head when I noticed the thread title.

1) I'd really like to know more where Kodi is going. This is probably discussed through certain avenues between certain parties, but for the large public maybe you guys can do a bit better. The News section is very nicely looking now but it was never really filled with announcements of substance. We appreciate the April's fools joke, the announcements of what the next version name is, the forever ongoing battle vs distro packages that don't help our image, etc. Yet there is nothing of the type say "we are ~30% done with <I'm making this up> refactoring the playback engine so updates to it can be done granular and platform independent". The absence of these news raises some questions... Is there a project management, is there a direction...? What is that direction?

2) Cool things are hard to come buy and, after this many years of development, low hanging fruit may not exist anymore. What the heck would be cool? Yeah, that's hard cause not everything appeals to everybody. A lot of things in Kodi are cool because of its skinning engine. But... (this came to me reading this thread) Who are we? People who have collected media for decades now. It's very common to have hundreds and thousands of movies and tv series and music and half a mil photos and many other things.

For some of us we are running our own Netflix. I've asked myself many times why am I doing this? Watch it once and be done with it. Keep only items that are really important. But human psyche is fickle and wants many things. The idea was that if I wake up one morning and wanna watch that sequence from a movie, that episode from a series - it will be there at my fingertips, unshackled from the practice of popping a disc, waiting to be called a potential criminal in 3 languages and so on. Press - play - enjoy. A lot of effort went into that - and I'm running out of walls to put steelbooks on, between other consequences.

The content is here, in the thousands. How do I get to it? With the same queries just like 20 years ago. Heck, we don't even have a GUI equivalent of SQL isnull, when making a smartlist. We have, say, ratings from everywhere. How about doing weighted averages, how about some advanced statistics? Dare I say prediction? Not just plop randomly a few chosen items from the "not played yet" list. The hardware we're running Kodi nowadays has increased in computing power by a few orders of magnitude, yet how are we leveraging it?

We are collecting now a lot of metadata, mountains of it. Scrape everything there is to know. How is this and the associated media presented in a relational way? (for people unfamiliar with databases I'll just say relational means "these things go well together"). As an example there are some debates in the music section to put (video) concerts together with music, shoehorn them if nothing else works. That is telling. People would enjoy the relational aspect of media, they just don't know what's it called in tech terms. The back-end dbases in Kodi - be them SQlite or MariaDB, etc are all relational. But right now everything is labeled as Movies | TV Series | Music (music videos is somebody's stepchild and never really got any attention). Anything else that cannot be categorized or easily referenced like that gets into a lot of trouble by the dbase schema used and its immediate influence on skinning. How about giving this some thought, take it to the next level. We are sitting on a mountain of media at home - both acquired and produced (now in the age of phones that shoot 8K videos and drones which facilitate a lot of creative choices). How do we use it?

I will never go to streaming, just for the convenience of it. But I would like to rival their algorithms, I'd like to find new ways to enjoy what I already own. I'd like to have my mini-Watson, that could build a music playlist where the next song can only vary 10% in BPM and not cross outside of a defined main genre category, with mood prediction based on last month play history. I would like to dream orange when I fly over Mars.

THAT is what I'd like to read in the news section about Kodi.

[PatK]

share what went through my head

I'm in agreement with many of your observations, and you've shared your thoughts perfectly. The road map has been to Keep Kodi up-to-date with the interests of the users and their hardware while keeping a vehicle of development intriguing enough that creative energy's can find Kodi a platform of concern. To the observant, keeping abreast of the forum posts should indicate direction and interest. I hesitate to suggest which brush strokes the artists will apply next to the overall picture, for fear of sharing a distorted perspective.

Yes, I'm as guilty as the next for hoarding videos. The addiction to collect, private libraries, records has gone on from time immemorial; I think it's the compulsion of humans to be in a group of hunters or gatherers, and clearly collections seem to be an indication that 7 skinny years of video drought might be upon us or at least we fool ourselves to believe that this might come to pass. For me it's become a matter of controlling content, I get to see what I want when I want without any corporate decisions and without interruptions. I committed myself to this path many years ago, and found digital media with Kodi the vehicle of choice to build from, but content is king.

Without a doubt; Kodi has short comings in many areas; your comment 'weighted averages', stands out as a great idea and a post in feature requests might spark some interest in bringing this to fruition. It's users like you that make the difference, but to bring ideas to reality requires skill, knowledge and most of all time, the team is ever vigilant for new  people to partner and bring these dreams to execution. Whatever your skills, contributions of any kind are welcome regardless of how small. Re: computing power by a few orders of magnitude. Along with 4K h265 HDR+ audio, dealing with large collections, streaming services, free, open sourced and multi-platforms;  I get where you're coming from but be cognoscente of where we came.

I would like to dream orange when I fly over Mars.

On the Red planet no less. The Team is with you and the future looks bright, it's just that there is a few glitches in the space suit.

[DarrenHill]

@Daydream - again you make some good comments, but for the first item the point to remember is that Kodi is produced and supported by an entirely voluntary team. None of us are paid for our work/effort, and it's done around real life work and commitments. As a result, deadlines and suchlike aren't really how things are done, as it's normally whatever interests the dev or team member, and whatever time they are willing and able to devote to the project.

It's quite often that a large project gets started, then something comes up, or a roadblock is hit, and things take a slower pace or a back seat for a while. Sometimes they even stop, and either get picked up later, someone else takes over or they just die on the vine. People come, people go and people take sabbaticals or get new jobs/wives/kids/hobbies/day-job workload and situations change.

Due to that, roadmapping Kodi is very difficult, both in terms of direction and timescale. We try to release reasonably often for both bug fixes and new features, but as has been seen recently this can sometimes take a good while and then not be perfect.

We do blog stuff that may be of wider interest (for example the switch to Weblate translation that was announced today, but some times are busier than others news-wise, and as we're early in the pre-Alpha state for Nexus, it's one of those quieter times when the guys are busy breaking stuff up to build new and better onto Kodi.

But we're open source, so anyone who wishes to can grab the source code and tinker a bit (or a lot), and can also write an addon or suchlike as well if they don't want to get that deep. Our dev team is currently quite small, but we're doing what we can to keep things going and give people what they want though where possible.

[DarrenHill]

The other point is that as it's all volunteer work, people work on what they like and what interests them.

So whilst having an idea may get implemented via a feature request, unless you want to take up the keyboard and code yourself it's somewhat luck of the draw in finding something that others feel is a good idea and are interested in bringing to the codebase. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it isn't and (seemingly) good ideas go by the wayside as no-one is interested in (or has time to) get them in a working state.

There isn't any "big boss" or even commitee who dictate what must go in and what must be done. The Kodi Foundation Board deliberately do not guide the code, or indeed have much direct input to it at all (although there are of course devs sometimes as board members, but that's more wearing two volunteer hats). And in some cases, even trying to introduce such guidance would be along the lines of trying to herd cats, and for a few the aforesaid cats would be large, orange and striped

We do discuss as a team what may need to be done (for example the recent update from Python2 to Python3) and volunteers are sought to look into it or work on it. But there is never any obligation or expectation to do so. That's the big difference between our volunteer team and a paid production house writing commercial code.