After installing Ubuntu 22.04, Kodi on a home theater PC would frequently freeze. This issue, applicable to various Linux distros, can be resolved…
Category: Kodi
Linux users: How to Run Netflix in Kodi (original title: How to Run Netflix on the Raspberry Pi)
This is a case where a blog post is kind of mis-titled, and suggests that the article has more narrow application than it really does. The original title suggests it only applies to Raspberry Pi users, but if you actually read the article you find that the method shown should be equally applicable to any Linux-based distribution running Kodi, or at least to those Linux distros that are based on Debian (Debian, Raspbian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Zorin OS, and many more). The same method would probably work on non-Debian-based distros as well, if you can get the required dependencies using their package managers, and if Kodi will run on them. I understand that it was published in a blog intended for Raspberry Pi users, so that’s probably why they tried to make it seem only relevant to the Raspberry Pi, but if you are running Kodi on some other Linux distro and want to view your Netflix content, you might try giving the method shown in this article a try:
How to Run Netflix on the Raspberry Pi – Pi My Life Up
How to install Kodi media player to Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) Desktop
We recently wanted to install the Kodi media player software to a system running Ubuntu 18.04 desktop. Here is the procedure we followed.
Source: How to install Kodi media player to Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) Desktop – Two “Sort Of” Tech Guys
Make LIRC work in Ubuntu 18.04, so that you can use your infrared remote in Kodi
If you are a Kodi user and have recently tried to upgrade your system to Ubuntu 18.04, and then tried to install and use LIRC to make your infrared remote control work the way it should, you may have discovered that it doesn’t work. For one thing, you don’t get the configuration menu during the install process, so you can’t select your make and model of remote. Even the old standby of using sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc to bring up the configuration menu doesn’t work anymore.
Plugin brings Netflix to Kodi Media Center (unofficially, but without breaking DRM) – Liliputing
There’s an open source Kodi plugin that lets you login to Netflix, browse the streaming video service’s catalog, and play videos.
Source: Plugin brings Netflix to Kodi Media Center (unofficially, but without breaking DRM) – Liliputing
How to “downgrade” Kodi back to 14.2 (Helix) in Ubuntu 14.04 (EDIT: or maybe back to 15.2 Isengard)
Important
This is a very old article. If you are trying to downgrade from a newer version of Kodi back to a previous one, see this section of the Kodi wiki for current information.
In perusing Reddit I discovered that someone associated with the Kodi forums may have tried to censor this information. So, I figured I’d give them a little taste of the Streisand effect. And this is useful technical information that should be made available, IMHO, because new versions of software sometimes introduce bugs not present in older versions. This was originally posted by Kodi forum user opensorce in a thread that no longer exists. USE THIS INFORMATION STRICTLY AT YOUR OWN RISK! I SUGGEST DOING A FULL SYSTEM BACKUP BEFORE YOU PROCEED.
If you’re running Ubuntu 14.04 and you’re having trouble with Kodi 15 Isengard you can return back to 14.2 by doing the following:
1) Follow the instructions here to completely remove Kodi from your system
2) Download these two files: https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi-bin_14.2~git20150327.1058-final-0trusty_i386.deb and
https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi_14.2~git20150327.1058-final-0trusty_all.deb for 32 bit and https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi-bin_14.2~git20150327.1058-final-0trusty_amd64.deb and https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi_14.2~git20150327.1058-final-0trusty_all.deb for 64 bit.3) Install Kodi-bin then Kodi for a return to 14.2 (“dpkg -i kodi-bin*” and then “dpkg -i kodi_*” without the quotes should do it)
4) Be sure not to allow any updates to Kodi until you want to change to 15.
Note: Some users have experienced issues with dependencies after uninstalling 15. Be sure you follow all the instructions to uninstall 15 before re-installing 14.2.
Hope this helps!
EDIT: Although my own efforts with this method have proven successful on Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04 wsnipex says “this will probably break on anything but ubuntu 14.04”. So be aware!
Later comments in the thread indicated that additional dependencies may be required (so watch the output of the dpkg commands when you run them and look for missing dependencies, which can usually be installed using apt-get) and/or that “sudo apt-get -f install” may need to be run in order to fix missing dependencies. Also there were comments to the effect that this will ONLY work with Ubuntu 14.04 and not with any other version of Ubuntu. I suspect that’s because the downloaded files are from the “trusty” section of the repository, and that if you were running a different version you’d need to obtain the proper .deb files for that version.
EDIT FOR THOSE WISHING TO DOWNGRADE TO KODI VERSION 15.2: If you are attempting to downgrade from Kodi 16 to Kodi 15.2 on a Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit system, these may be the files you will need: https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi-bin_15.2~git20151019.1039-final-0trusty_amd64.deb and https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc/+archive/ubuntu/ppa/+files/kodi_15.2~git20151019.1039-final-0trusty_all.deb – I have downloaded and saved these files as a form of insurance, so that I can get Kodi Isengard back in the event that my HTPC crashes and burns, but I have not actually attempted an install using them. I did this only because the TVHeadEnd PVR addon in Kodi 16 is again broken (but in different ways than before) in Kodi Jarvis, and there is no firm indication of if or when the Kodi developers will fix these new issues, only that they don’t plan to fix them at all in Jarvis. If you install these, and have any problems that you need to resolve before they will run, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment to that effect).
Here is another method from a post by user hd789 in a thread on the Kodi forum that may work with Ubuntu 15.10:
DOWNGRADE KODI 16.0 TO 15.2 IN UBUNTU 15.10 INCL TVHEADEND:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/kodi-old
$ sudo apt-get update
$ apt-cache showpkg kodi
$ sudo apt-get install kodi=2:15.2~git20151101.0902-final-0wily kodi-bin=2:15.2~git20151101.0902-final-0wily
$ sudo apt-get install kodi-pvr-tvheadend-hts=2.1.18-2~wily kodi-pvr-hts=2.1.18-2~wily
$ sudo apt-mark hold kodi kodi-bin kodi-pvr-tvheadend-hts kodi-pvr-hts
I would just call your attention to the fact that all these files are specific to a particular version of Ubuntu, in other words, the files that will work under Ubuntu 15.10 won’t work work under Ubuntu 14.04. Note that if you have Synaptic installed on your system, then after running the first two commands above (sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/kodi-old and sudo apt-get update) above you should be able to see the old kodi-related packages in Synaptic and install them from there. That is how we got Kodi 15.2 installed on a Ubuntu 14.04 system recently. It appears that repository contains versions for Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) and Ubuntu 15.10 (wily).
Link: ODROID-C1 is a $35 quad-core, single-board Android/Linux PC
When the Raspberry Pi team launched a tiny, low power computer priced at just $35, it was pretty remarkable. But that was 2 years ago, and while the Raspberry Pi has seen a few updates in that time, it’s still powered by the same single-core 700 MHz Broadcomm BCM2835 ARM11 processor.
Over the past few years a number of other single-board computers with more powerful hardware have appeared, but they usually also have higher price tags.
Hardkernel’s ODROID-C1 doesn’t though… it’s a quad-core mini computer that sells for just $35.
Full article and demonstration videos here:
ODROID-C1 is a $35 quad-core, single-board Android/Linux PC (Liliputing)
Related:
$35 quad-core hacker SBC offers Raspberry Pi-like size and I/O (LinuxGizmos.com)
Ordroid-C1 vs Raspberry Pi B+: Hardware, Benchmark, Storage and Ethernet Performance Comparison tables from Ordroid
Link: Some hints for getting free-to-air satellite channels into the Electronic Program Guide in Kodi (or another frontend)
If you are running a satellite backend system such as TVHeadEnd or MediaPortal (or MythTV, if you are one of the lucky few that can actually get it to work), and you use Kodi or the MythTV frontend, then it is possible to populate the schedule grid with listings from many sources. Note I did not say that it is easy, just that it is possible. The key is to use an external program … These are commonly referred to as “schedule grabbers”, or just “grabber” programs.
The real trick is figuring out how to use one of those programs. …..
Some hints for getting free-to-air satellite channels into the Electronic Program Guide in Kodi (or another frontend) (Free-To-Air America)
If your MCE compatible remote stopped working in Ubuntu 14.04 or another newer release of Linux, check for this weird problem!
Note: The issue described below is not the same one that is affecting many users of recent versions of Ubuntu. For a solution to that problem, see Make LIRC work in Ubuntu 18.04, so that you can use your infrared remote in Kodi.
If you have found this page you have probably already come across several other pages that try to tell you how to get the MCE USB remote working in Ubuntu. Maybe you are a Kodi user and you came across this thread, and you tried everything but nothing would work – in fact, when you ran the ir-keytable program (which you’ve almost certainly already installed if you’ve found any other pages on this subject) in test mode, you may have found that on the keys that work at all, you got strange combinations of square brackets and letters instead of the expected output. Well, before you give up, and especially if you’re installing Ubuntu (or some other *buntu variant) on new hardware, here are two things to check.
First, if you are using a USB infrared receiver, try a different USB port. In our case, this made the difference between getting no response at all out of the thing and the aforementioned cryptic square brackets/letters.
But also, try running sudo ir-keytable one more time, and look to see if maybe it’s finding more than one IR device (even if you are sure you only have one). For example, when we ran it, we were seeing this (and I hate to say it, but it took far too long to dawn on me that we were seeing TWO devices there):
$ sudo ir-keytable Found /sys/class/rc/rc0/ (/dev/input/event4) with: Driver ite-cir, table rc-rc6-mce Supported protocols: NEC RC-5 RC-6 JVC SONY SANYO LIRC RC-5-SZ other Enabled protocols: RC-6 Name: ITE8704 CIR transceiver bus: 25, vendor/product: 1283:0000, version: 0x0000 Repeat delay = 500 ms, repeat period = 125 ms Found /sys/class/rc/rc1/ (/dev/input/event10) with: Driver mceusb, table rc-rc6-mce Supported protocols: NEC RC-5 RC-6 JVC SONY SANYO LIRC RC-5-SZ other Enabled protocols: RC-6 Name: Media Center Ed. eHome Infrared bus: 3, vendor/product: 1784:0008, version: 0x0101 Repeat delay = 500 ms, repeat period = 125 ms
The real IR device is the “Media Center Ed. eHome Infrared”, so what’s the “ITE8704 CIR transceiver”? We have no idea – maybe there’s some vestigial circuitry for an IR receiver in the computer, and it’s detected during startup, but there no actual IR receiver there? In any case, once we realized what the problem was, we found the solution in a post in the Kodi forum:
edit : “/etc/modprob.d/blacklist.conf” and add the line:
blacklist ite_cir
And reboot
The prevents the operating system from seeing the non-existent IR receiver, and only lets it see the real one. We then reinstalled lirc (which we had removed because so many pages had said it wasn’t necessary) and all of a sudden our remote came back to life, with all the buttons working in Kodi again. If you have a similar situation, you can try blacklisting the driver for the non-existent or non-functional device in a similar manner. And if that isn’t the problem, perhaps one of the links mentioned above can help. That’s Linux for you sometimes – the solution to a problem takes about 30 seconds to implement, but finding it takes HOURS. 🙁
Recent Comments