[retSava]

Argh, this must be so frustrating for the Kodi devs...! There really is a very strong case for running a Kodi-box for ones own legit collection, and now it's just mentioned for the (admittedly, probably) not so slight share of piracy.

MPAA and friends has turned their eye on Kodi since a while ago, like Sauron on the little hobbitses. Could this be a submarine piece?

[tracker1]

Agreed, for the longest time, I'd been using Kodi on HTPC to access my lan content with a decent UX but at the same time wanted Amazon video and Netflix support, not to mention Hulu and the like. Now I use an NVidia Shield TV with Kodi as an app, but still wish it was the other way around.

I also hope that Android TV integration for VLC gets better, there are a few things for SMB/CIFS shares that require you hookup a mouse to get through.

[snerbles]

> Could this be a submarine piece?

Considering that Wired is a legacy media (Condé Nast) publication, it's not inconceivable.

[Digit-Al]

Who would financially benefit enough to pay for it though? There's no one big seller of the boxes and the software is free.

Edit: For clarification - I'm not saying it's impossible. I just personally can't see any obvious beneficiary. Would welcome any suggestions though.

[giobox]

I'd be shocked if the number of "legitimate" Kodi users is even close to the number of those using it to obtain whatever TV/movie content they are interested in not having to pay for.

Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) in the UK commissioned a report claiming as much as a million of them have been sold in the UK alone - while I'd take that number with a large pinch of salt given the source, It's pretty clear these things are being sold preconfigured for piracy in substantial numbers in the UK. Several cases concerning individuals have found the individual sellers to have had revenues well in excess of £100,000.

To be clear, I'm in no way advocating banning Kodi just because it has the potential for questionable use, but I think it's also silly to feel frustrated that people only talk about what is probably its most common use case: watching content you haven’t paid for.

[thirdsun]

While that may be true it's a rather recent development that the devs over at Kodi certainly don't enjoy. Kodi or XBOX media center / XBMC as it was known has been around since the early (original) XBOX days. It powered my home theater for years, long before it was sold as a piracy box.

If we reduce Kodi to piracy related use cases, we might as well throw in VLC.

[m-p-3]

Thanks to Kodi, my Steam Link has been repurposed into something I actually use.

[Splines]

How's the performance on it? I tried it recently and found it pretty unsatisfactory. Maybe it was the media - I read somewhere that if the file needs transcoding it's all in software.

[gatesphere]

What is a submarine piece?

[Jun8]

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html