It’s been a long and winding road but I’m
finally getting to a point where I have a software and hardware infrastructure
that’s robust flexible and meets my main requirements.
Principally, I’m after a whole-house a/v
solution that facilitates multi-room viewing and listening with a simple
interface that supports the following;
- Live TV viewing with PVR capabilities
- Centralised media storage & database (maintain one library centrally)
- Multi-device & OS client support – mixed Windows & OSX environment
Not too difficult, surely? Well, I’ve been
through a bunch of front ends and back ends and middleware and have ended up
with what’s for me a fine and usable system, albeit with a few minor niggles.
KODI – The Heart of It All
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Kodi
over the years. Until recently, the main factor preventing me using it was the
inferior video quality – especially noticeable on LiveTV showing sports. For
this reason, I’ve been using MediaPortal which had an infinitely better video
image.
Somewhere in recent releases, however, this
has been fixed and video quality is now on a par with anything else I’ve tried.
Plus it’s just great software. Very
configurable, a bunch of skins and UI variants, constant updates and a great
support community. Plus it runs on Windows, OSX, Linux and pretty much anything
you want and has LiveTV and Optical Disc support. It ticks a lot of boxes for
me.
The one issue I have with it though is the
local database infrastructure. Each client needs to configure it’s own library
and there’s no sharing of watched status etc. (it is possible to set up a
shared central database bit it’s messy, poorly documented and not fully
supported).
Step Up Emby
Emby is a super centralised media
management server with DLNA serving, a multitude of clients and, critically, a
great Kodi plug-in.
I use the central Emby server to manage my
media and install the plug-in on Kodi clients. There’s a bit of configuring
with paths and settings to get it all working but once up and running, it’s
pretty transparent in that it just integrates right into the Kodi media
libraries.
Streaming Services?
Support for Spotify is provided in Kodi via
the Spotlight plug-in. It’s limited in features (very little management, but
does the job of providing access to pre-configured playlists and allows Spotify
music to be streamed through the Kodi UI.
But what about TV?
So Kodi clients all around and centralised,
easily managed media management. But what about PVR? I haven’t quite cut the
cord fully yet and we watch a good deal of TV in our house, both digital
terrestrial and satellite.
For tuning and management, I’ve set up
ArgusTV on a server and use the PVR capabilities in Kodi to provide a front end
meaning I’ve got access to all my local music, movies and Live TV in a single
unified interface with great image quality and configurable UI.
And Control?
Well, most of my clients support IR control
and a standard MCE profile on a Logitech remote provides basic functionality. I
also run the official Kodi remote app on iOS and that provides a nice UI to all
of the above.
There’s got to be a catch, right?
Well, yes, a few things are sub-optimal;
The main bugbear is that while ArgusTV
supports series recording, access to this is not officially supported in Koid
front-end. It’s possible to set up a timer to record an individual show but to
configure ArgusTV to record the full show, this must be done through it’s own
Web UI or on the server. A bit of an inconvenience.
There’s also an issue with music album
cover art in the Emby Plugin. All my tracks are tagged with art and a lot of
albums show up with art in the Emby plugin, though some don’t and I can’t
figure out why, even though all the tracks on the album show covers when I
drill down. A puzzle for sure.
Netflix is a pain in that it doesn’t integrate
well with kodi and the windows App doesn’t support remot controls so either
keyboard control is required r use of the embedded version in TVs or players is
required.
Apart from that, there’s not a lot I have
to complain about. Just this week my 11 year old – used to the ‘TV’ changing on
a regular basis, came to me and said ‘this one works well’. Success, of a sort!
A note on Hardware
This system is enabled by a beefy unRAID
server which looks after all the media storage and runs a few Virtual Machines;
Windows 7 ‘TVServer’ VM
A headless Windiws 7 VM that runs ArgusTV
and Emby servers. There’s 6x Digital Devices tuners passed through that provide
all the TV inputs.
Widows 8 HTPCs
Two Win 8.1 VMs run Kodi and have GPUs
passed through. These connect via HDMI to two of my TVs
Additionally, I have a couple of Gigabyte
Brix system that are hooked up to TVs in places where I can’t run cHDMI able
from the server. These are also configured with Kodi clients.
I also have an OPPO 103 Blu-Ray player that
can access all the media on the network and a couple of Macs with Kodi.
