Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Kodi finally starts actively fighting against piracy

So, this happened.

For those who don't know what Kodi is, it's the old XBMC, which is an open source media center for various platforms. Originally running on jailbroken Xbox, they expanded to a wide range of platforms.

The fact Team Kodi is finally going to crack down on people selling "Kodi boxes" preloaded with illegal addons is good news, indeed. It adds more legitimacy to the whole project.

What I didn't expect to see was that, in the comments to that blog post, there are people openly supporting piracy! And implying that Kodi has massively benefitted from it and Team Kodi are hypocrites.

Get real, lads. There are many, many ways to use Kodi legally. If you have the money to spare and put in a little effort you can have a huge collection of media stashed in a NAS, plus a legal emulation source from the Internet Archive via the Internet Archive ROM Launcher, and on top of that you can integrate your loaned cable box from your cable provider into it with the appropriate backend and plugin. All legal.

Of course, you can't get an official Netflix plugin, because the MPAA are allergic to open source, but there are many ways to control Netflix on Windows with a very good setup, some of which integrated into Kodi itself. And there are also many legal plugins to different content providers.

No, Kodi doesn't require Genesis to be great. And Team Kodi's move against piracy is a great one.

2 comments:

  1. Great thoughts, Kodi doesn't need any of stream crap to be great.

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    1. I think my favorite thing about Kodi is how pretty it can look. No matter how many alternatives I try due to Kodi's shortcomings, I keep going back to it. I'm looking forward to v17 Krypton release because of the rewritten video player as well as Xbox One controller support (finally!)

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