Getting Kodi running on modern Apple TVs is an exercise in frustration if you don't already own an Apple computer+yearly Xcode subscription. Assuming you have it running there is an mpv renderer. If you don't your best bet is Infuse. Which is just a fancy GUI for mpv and it will nag you for money ($12 a year and/or $100 for "lifetime" sub) to render most common audio codecs that aren't AAC, mp3 and opus. That said, while I haven't given them any money I've been using it for awhile on the one Apple TV I have and it has worked well for everything. It plays anything from my NAS fine provided the audio codec isn't something like E-AC3 or something. I typically just transcode the audio for those files over to Opus since the device is just hooked up to an old HDTV with hdmi and is playing the audio through the TV speakers.
Kodi runs fine on most devices I've used it on. My friend uses it on an Xbox One to access my media server. It only craps out when rendering full screen signs when he's watching anime. But that's mainly due to the fact that third party applications from the app store like KODI aren't given full access to the CPU/GPU. I can't remember speifics now but I know it's forced to do everything on one CPU core. So video+audio rendering combined with advanced subtitles effects cause it to crap out for a few frames now and again.
I do care about subtitles - and I do know that sometimes subtitles don't render great. But what I'm discovering is that it often boils down to file format and properly specifying how it gets rendered.
It has more to do with what features of the ASS standard are being used and the renderer installed on the end user's machine. I can eaisly make most consumer devices and software players lag down to 1fps using simple fullscreen overlays and the most simple fonts with no effects. This isn't an uncommon situation either. A lot of shows require doing stuff like that to translate full screen signs and other things important to the plot. It gets even worse when you need to translate multiple signs that are moving and important to the plot.
no, it doesn't take a very beefy machine any more.
A high end CPU from the last 2 years will crap out even with a simple full screen sign that's not moving if you're using most common media players. Even with the latest and greatest (libass) you have to be
very careful. Hence why commercial streaming companies still default to very simple fonts+effects and do the bare minimum. They could do better and use more advanced features (it's going to lag the end users machine anyway) but they prefer to churn out the episodes as fast as possible for the least amount of money and time. They don't even hire people that know the language well anymore. But that's another rant for another time (the industry is really bad).
Once again, if you think VLC doesn't support some kind of newer codec or renders some subtitles improperly - that's because your copy has been compiled without proper support for them.
C'mon man I do this professinally. I know the ins and outs of the different platforms I'm targetting and the various bugs within each. That's all I was trying to make people aware of: If you have an issue rendering something in VLC don't bother crying to the content provider. They will not care. The reason they won't care is the VLC guys do not care. A quick glance at the list of bug reports and the way they treat people attempting to report and fix them is proof enough of that. The VLC project has been horrible for 15-20 years now from both the end user and developer side of things. Which is why most of us gave up long ago on it becoming any better.
The
only benefit VLC ever offered was the fact that it bundled in every codec and library needed. So the end user didn't have to screw around with installing codecs and setting up rendering and all the other stuff that (used to be) a huge pain. But we have better tools now like ffmpeg and codec support isn't the issue it once was. You're far better off using system wide codecs and libraries and something like mpv (or mpc-hc on Window) to render your conent with them. The codecs are more likely to work correctly and the UI is far better.
It would take me hours to go point-by-point on VLC bugs and issues in detail. I prefer not to do it. Anyone that's interested can go look at the bug tracker or the hundreds of thousands of posts on the internet going back decades for the various problems. There are plenty of 16+ year bugs in VLC that will never be fixed because the maintainers refuse to let anyone fix them. They prefer to engage in a holy war with everyone else and add in more and more "features" that will stay half broken until the end of time. It isn't good software and I'm willing to argue until the end of time that it never was.
This doesn't mean mpv doesn't suffer from similar problems development wise. But at least bugs do get fixed and you get your choice of countless GUIs built on top of it if you need something beyond the basic UI that it offers. It's also much eaiser to fix it should something go wrong or you discover it isn't rendering something correctly. It's also "the standard" for people producuing content. Meaning; If you report to me that something I produced is broken in mpv I'm very likely to take you serious and either fix the media file itself or more likely file a bug report with the mpv guys where I can expect collaberation and for it to be fixed in a timely manner. If you tell me VLC isn't playing nice I'm just going to tell you good luck and to try another media player (any media player).
But if it works for you more power to you. I don't really care what you're using to consume media. Lots of people still like Quicktime and Windows media player to for reasons I'll never understand.
It can even stream from the box to your phone or let you use your phone as a wifi-based remote!
github.com
odysee.com
