Kodi Future Plans - Kodi Server

[denethor 90]

Today I' ve just read the slides from Kodi Team Fosdem 2015 Presentation. Click for the link.

 

Looks like the Kodi team have plans for Kodi Server. Do you guys have any plans to work together on this? Or did anyone discuss this before? If not, I think this is huge waste of limited developer resources. What do you guys think about it?

 

Quote from presentation:

Kodi Server:

Headless instance of Kodi, controlled through JSON-RPC and webinterface. Intended to be central media hub where other Kodi clients get their data (library) and media from.

Edited March 16, 2015 by denethor

[FredipusRex 12]

They've been working on a headless server for years now but have never gotten very far - mostly because the main devs have been disinterested. Last I checked (about a month ago), they were still mainly talking about DLNA and JSON between instances.

[Luke 37125]

there will definitely be the ability to serve content to kodi clients through their upnp interface, in addition to our add-on, of course. so the ability to use MBS with kodi clients is always going to be there.

 

as far as collaboration, from one open source project to another i agree with your sentiment, and it's a good idea just not always easy to achieve. but certainly where possible i think some teaming up would be great.

[dark_slayer 103]

They've been working on a headless server for years now but have never gotten very far - mostly because the main devs have been disinterested. Last I checked (about a month ago), they were still mainly talking about DLNA and JSON between instances.

+1

 

Looks like the Kodi team have plans for Kodi Server. Do you guys have any plans to work together on this? Or did anyone discuss this before? If not, I think this is huge waste of limited developer resources. What do you guys think about it?

Lol, like Fredipus said it's been "coming" and "on the roadmap" for a while. Also as to limited developer resources, Kodi is moving more and more to an ffmpeg style "don't like it submit a patch" or wait till some college student / grad student does it for a school project / thesis. Nothing wrong with that model, and by no means am I trying to knock them for it . . . taking a look at their feature requests thread then counting the number of developers it makes pretty good sense that quite a few of them spend the majority of their time (probably not as much by choice but necessity) checking pull requests.

 

As to duplicating features, there are a few scenarios that may pan out

 

1) They do a frontend / backend library framework like they did with PVR. Letting you add a variety of sources like MB3, Plex, Mediaportal, meediOS, etc with the option obviously for metadata managers like MCM and Ember to becomes sources with little change. ~ Nice for MB3

2) They duplicate efforts, but continue to allow standard nfo importing ~ still nice for MB3 just not as optimal

 

With the more likely result being 2 there are still plenty of options to "marry" your Kodi clients and MB3 server

1. Kodi add-on and custom skins (nice/easy/full-featured)
2. DLNA renderer only (no library on kodi clients, just play to target from MB3)
3. UPNP library (works on low power devices but missing a few features you'd have in the add-on and custom skin)
4. Use trakt.tv as the glue between your kodi and mb3 servers

[Koleckai Silvestri 1150]

May affect Linux server users as there isn't a real MediaBrowser client for Linux yet. For many MediaBrowser users in a Windows environment, I think they will continue using existing clients. Though something may occur to improve the server more as well.

[denethor 90]

May affect Linux server users as there isn't a real MediaBrowser client for Linux yet. For many MediaBrowser users in a Windows environment, I think they will continue using existing clients. Though something may occur to improve the server more as well.

 

Well I totally agree. But majority of Kodi users are using Windows (2,3M) Android is 2nd (2,1M - this is weird by the way ) and Linux (1,2M) is 3rd according to same presentation.

 

If MB3 Server have had native Linux binaries (I personally not a fan of Mono) there is absolutely not point to develop Kodi Server in my view.  MB3 can serve Kodi clients in almost every possible way. JSON, DLNA etc. Whatever they need. Especially if you think about next 1-year time frame. Actually MB3 already doing that with MB3 add-on and doing well for a Beta and relatively young software.