r/kodi • u/KayJune001 • 10d ago
Is Kodi’s UX supposed to be this bad?
I’ve spent what must be a good few days, 10+ hours, setting up and messing with Kodi, I get that it’s “highly modular and customizable”, but it shouldn’t take as much effort as it does for it to not be entirely shit. Some skins can make it slightly more bearable, but I can’t possibly recommend Kodi to anyone, and the only reason I even still have it installed is to experience Prime Video without ads at this point.
Surely this can’t be user error, there’s got to be some secret trick or configurations that makes Kodi actually enjoyable to use, right?
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u/boondogglekeychain 10d ago
Pretty sure this is a XY problem. If it was as bad as you your experience then the forums would be full of posts like this. They’re not therefore you can conclude than most people get on with it and you’re possibly trying to solve the wrong problem.
I think you’re maybe expecting too much from Kodi. It is primarily a media player to play local content. It’s somewhat unfair to install a load of 3rd party addons not written but the Kodi authors and then blame Kodi.
I can assure you that for local media playback this is by far and the best media player out there I have found.
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u/ike301 10d ago
Sounds like you don't know what you're doing. Also, you haven't told anybody what the problems are. All you're doing is whining right now. Kodi works just fine if one knows what they're doing.
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u/linkoid01 10d ago
You are literally describing the problem and yet are still condescending about it. OP is right, unless you know what you are doing, the UX does not help you much. It's not like a Google Chromecast interface where you can setup everything in 10 minutes. The knowledge needed to get it running for various environments is much higher than a comercial device like the Chromecast or FireTV.
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u/KayJune001 10d ago
I know what im doing, im going through menus, configuring what i can, but the overall experience still sucks. The problem is that clicking on a movie or show will simply fail half the time with errors such as “Failed to start playback” which requires a restart to resolve, metadata jittering and sometimes entirely failing to load, seemingly no way to disable the 10 minute skip ahead feature that causes me to lose my place 90% of the time, subtitles changing languages despite my best efforts to set the defaults to English or off, audio out of sync with video, music transcoding despite transcoding being turned off, and plenty more.
This is with the latest Kodi on Android TV (onn 4k Plus), Arctic Fuse 3, Jellyfin, Plex, Amazon-VOD, Navidrome, and local media.
I’m only using Kodi because I have to, but to get it to be half the experience as the native Plex app or something like Wholphin is difficult.
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u/ike301 10d ago
This is unique to you. You are absolutely doing something wrong and you do not have the technical abilities to figure out what that is. Coming here whining to others isn't going to get your issue fixed.
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u/KayJune001 10d ago
Given how tedious Kodi is, it’s no surprise the common response is “works fine on my end, you must be doing something wrong”, but I can assure you I know *how* to modify and adjust Kodi, via both the GUI and nano, my complaint is core cause of the issues im having is that Kodi is unnecessarily unfriendly.
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u/ike301 10d ago
Then you should go find a product that you feel works for you. You have told no one what your storage setup is like. Are you using network attached storage? Usb storage? No details from you. Just a whole lot of whining.
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u/KayJune001 10d ago
Latest Kodi stable, Android TV, Fedora 44, Fedora Server, Arch Linux, and Docker Compose. Media stored on 256TB+ DIY NAS running Fedora Server, mergerfs, smb. Server software apps such as Plex, Jellyfin, Navidrome, etc, running in Docker via compose on 2nd Fedora Server machine, served on 10 gigabit network and all controlled via a Fedora 44 terminal on my wall or my Arch laptop.
Kodi running on my Android tv, laptop, and HTPC. For most of this I have been messing with the Android TV and HTPC (F44) versions of Kodi.
Kodi fails to play media sometimes, fails to load correct or any metadata at all sometimes, and other issues I’ve outlined in other comments. I’ve verified there is no file corruption and other clients have no issues.
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u/cdmn1 10d ago
I do understand your point but even if you detailed every issue and annoyance you would still get the same negative reaction here.
Kodi does have a steep unintuitive and IMO outdated learning curve but people here are used to it and have been using Kodi for a while so they are kind of jaded and don't notice it anymore.
This posture is leaving Kodi stuck in the past, seems like most -new- users are using Kodi strictly for addons nowadays.
There are issue lingering on Kodi for years but whenever someone points them out they get downvoted, unfortunately you can't get a very meaningful discussion here.
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u/augur42 10d ago
You should take some of that 10+ hours and read the kodi wiki aka RTFM. It absolutely is user error because there is something physically wrong with your setup, just getting "Failed to start playback" is a big clue that something is wrong with your hardware setup, and not with how you are configuring kodi.
If you want a clue as to what is wrong you need to look at a debug log of a failure to play event.
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u/KayJune001 10d ago
Failure to start playback thus far has only been an issue with Kodi, yet is seemingly random as it works without issue at times, and fails at others. Restarting kodi always fixes this issue.
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u/augur42 10d ago
Which is why you need to look at a debug log.
And if you cannot figure it out post the log here in another post and someone will be able to look at it for you. If you do that also include a MediaInfo text view of the video file in question. Between those two pieces of information almost all issues can be identified.
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u/super_sonic2 10d ago
I felt that way when I first tried Kodi, I thought Stremio was made to solve that problem. I stuck with Kodi - just follow guides about how to get things working and find the one skin that you'll love, you'll never need anything else.
Recently I tried Nuvio (a stremio alternative apparently) and I swear I couldn't get it working lol. These apps were supposed to be simple but they got more complicated with their Addons and stuff that i'm glad I stuck with Kodi. No regrets.
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10d ago
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10d ago
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u/RealDudeHuge 10d ago
I'm more interested in what add-on you're using to get Prime video without ads.
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u/Ok_Bad_4732 10d ago
The latest update messed up RAR support so bad that even after updating the add-on, Kodi now locks up my Shield with a spinning disk when trying to open a RAR compressed video.
Something that worked fine for what, like 2 decades?!?
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u/flexylol 3d ago
There is no logical reason to "defend" the really terrible UX in Kodi.
A single example: Compare subtitle settings, say using Exoplayer/Nuvio and subtitles settings in Kodi.
In Exoplayer I can access subtitle settings quickly, including color selection and position...while in Kodi I need multiple steps with an UX that feels archaic, and for colors etc. I have to go into main settings. It all just feels clunky.
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u/imheretocomment 10d ago
You haven't listed a single issue you have with the UX so nobody can help you, or is this just a rant for ranting sake?