Slashdot Mirror
The Kodi Development Team Wants To Be Legitimate and Bring DRM To the Platform. (torrentfreak.com)
New submitter pecosdave writes: The XBMC/ Kodi development team has taken a lot of heat over the years, mostly due to third-party developers introducing piracy plugins to the platform. In many cases, cheap Android computers are often sold with these plugins pre-installed with the Kodi or XBMC name attached to them -- something that caused Amazon to ban sales of such devices. The Kodi team is not happy about this, and has taken the fight to the sellers. The Kodi team is now trying to work with rights holders to introduce DRM and legitimate plugins to the platform. Is this the first step towards creating a true one-stop do it yourself Linux entertainment system?
There's a reason many people used this platform (right or wrong) and they're removing that reason. Now, they'll just be yet another media player that's locked in with DRM in a giant pool of pre-existing systems.
If it in any way prevents me from running pirated movies/TV shows, or tattles on me, then goodbye.
Goodnight, it's been nice while it lasted.
When these guys start doing something people hate, someone will fork and make it good again. Just look at Apache->MariaDB or OpenOffice->LibreOffice.
PLEASE!
I am sooo tired of running windows 7 and Media Center just so I can watch and record protected content... Soon I won't be able to do even that, once M$ stops supporting Win 7...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That would be great.
But anything that is going to restrict the usage of other features/media, that's not going to work.
No one cares if the solution is linux except for those that intend to pirate. Legal, paid content is already available on existing platforms.
As long as it doesn't become an either/or scenario, then I look forward to using Netflix through kodi!
Why do people who know nothing always feel obliged to open their mouths in public to demonstrate their own stupidity and ignorance?
Costs more? Uses more electricity? Pain in the ass? WTF are you going on about? Kodi works just fine on my raspberry pi, and I've never noticed it to qualify for any of these statements, no piracy needed.
Chrome for Linux can play DRM content. Spotify for Linux can play DRM content.
What the hell do we even need Kodi for?
This seems to happen whenever an OSS project goes mainstream and someone decides they want to be "respected" by the evil jerks who created the situation that led to the OSS project being created in the first place. If they create addons with DRM they will have to be binary only and separate from KODI itself since KODI is GPL2. That said KODI even points you to forks should you dislike their new direction
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Plex has overtaken them hard and they are desperately trying to catch up with the popularity of the rogue fork from years ago.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Over the last few years Kodi removed karaoke, choose a worse default skin and menu layout with worse customizability and worse loading icon, and created issues with virtually every add on with their updates and now they want to drm it? Gotta say Kodi is going way way downhill. I want a simple media player. This isn't a game breaking change on its own but it could be the last straw of many poor decisions that kills it. What are the other options now?
Because free market a lie, it is not about what the consumer wants, it is about what the corporate overlords force him to want, either via education or via threatening.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Hopefully they'll copy Firefox's approach of containing DRM modules inside a secure sandbox. In fact, if they can use Firefox's actual implementation then they can use the modules that already exist.
As long as they don't do anything against users playing videos that aren't encrypted and properly protect against fingerprinting then this shouldn't cause problems.
All the content I need is on a computer connected to my TV over HDMI. I don't need kodi for myself, but when my mom is babysitting my 2-year-old, I would like something with an easy menu interface that I can program content from multiple sources on. So whether my daughter wants to watch a show on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or a mp4 video file on the hard drive, my mom shouldn't have to know or care what the source of the content is.
Hopefully, Kodi can get to that point someday, but without official support from those streaming providers, it will never get there. Maybe this is a step in the right direction.
I have no qualms about DRM for things like Netlix, where I'm explicitly paying to 'rent' and suffering the ill effects of content coming and going just enough to frustrate me.
I have serious qualms that any 'digital' download to 'own' is DRM encumbered and will break if the vendor goes away or I look at things funny.
I had such high hopes when digital music drm went the way of the dodo, but ebooks and videos are still infested.
Of course, I am dealing with DRM still with media based purchases, but at least it is fully offline and not subject to the fortunes and whims of whatever business I bought it from.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
worked great, Napster became the most dominant platform for legitimate music downloads.
I used to like Kodi, until the damned thing updated to Frodo. At that point, my older HD Homerun suddenly became incompatible.
There was nothing illegal about using my own antenna to watch live TV on my device. They just broke it one day, and after trying to fix the problem I just gave up.
I wonder what the fork will be called. I've never seen a project so dedicated to ending itself. And why? Because people can do "bad" illegal things with it? I can do the same with Visual Studio or pretty much any application where you can write a plugin. Or really any platform that gets it content from the end user. NOTHING Kodi will do here will benefit them or curb piracy in anyway.
Can someone dumb it down enough for me to understand why in the hell someone would go to the trouble of throwing together a plugin to offer up illegal streaming content?? How is the plugin creator making money? Who is providing the bandwidth and servers to offer up the content or is it a P2P stream?
Back in the days of illegal satellite reception and FTA's, people hacked it for the money to be made but I don't see how that comes into play with Kodi's third party plugins.
BTW: When something illegal becomes so easily obtained by the masses, it will meet its demise, sooner rather than later!
Not so much that they get associated with "piracy", but by being associated with DRM.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Screaming about Kodi boxes on a daily basis with no clue what Kodi even is or that it runs on everything but Roku. I'm sure the Kodi devs love it seeing this constantly.
...Forked.
The Year of the Linux Entertainment System(tm).
A Pi draws more electricity than a Roku. Installing Linux is more a pain in the ass than a Roku, obviously. A Pi (with the necessary "accessories") costs more than a Roku.
CableCard is only a problem when it actually invokes its DRM capabilities
In other words, CableCARD is only a problem most of the time.
Legal, paid content is already available on existing platforms.
Through which existing platform can a U.S. or Canadian customer lawfully obtain Song of the South, Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, or Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea (the English dub of Les mondes engloutis)? Their publishers refuse to take my money.
They could of been more open source and Linux friendly, but thought that was stupid. Piracy via open source projects like Kodi add-ons is their fault. Is there an official add-on for these platforms on Kodi? Nope. When did Firefox start supporting those services for Linux? A few months go. Chrome is a bullshit option because they killed 32-bit almost two years ago and it's riddled with Google spyware. Chromium with Widevine works, but add-ons for Chrome anything sucks. Most web sites these days are slow as hell anyway with too much JavaScript and Flash everywhere. Kodi is much much faster and safer.
If they go ahead with this Kodi is dead. People who need DRM-ed content are not Kodi's user base.
> The Kodi Development Team Wants To Be Legitimate and Bring DRM To the Platform.
Since when you become legitimate by adding DRM to your platform? Oops, since W3C did the same thing, I'd guess. Bad behaviour is contagious...
Right now I run Kodi on an RPi2 Model B+. It's connected to my external hard drive, which stores all my movies and music, and HDMI out to my 40in LED. I'm already considering ditching this setup in favor of an Odroid-XU4 w/Ubuntu, since I just need something to basically run VLC....DRM will make me switch even faster.
I had to look up what a "Roku" is, and it doesn't look like I can get one where I live without messing around with international orders etc. So of course a Pi uses more electricity, since the Roku obviously wouldn't use any. It's also not very practical. On a more technical note, the one I looked at used 5V @ 1A, while the RPI is 5V @ ~2A, so ok, it uses more, but 5 or 10W.. it's basically a rounding error anyway.
"dd if=LibreELEC-RPi2.arm-8.0.1.img of=/dev/sdX ; sync" --- the PAIN! I'M DYING! ...No, not really.
Cost is contentious, it might if you actually have to buy everything you need, if you like me basically have everything you need in your drawers, the PI isn't expensive. It's also a heck of a lot more flexible. Get a $10 microSD card -- if you don't already have a drawer full of them -- and re-purposing the device becomes as simple as taking out the current card and popping in the new one with another image on.
All in all, your arguments are either wrong, utterly marginal or questionable.
As long as they (KODI) utterly refuse to stop playing non-DRM content, this is a no-lose scenario.
The instant the DRM crowd try to insist on policing the non-DRM content, KODI should walk, or fork.
- Paul
Maybe they don't want to, but there is a 100% chance that they will have to, in order to implement DRM.
Wondering what that thing is? They will remove the ability for the software to be audited or maintained.
Nothing with DRM is secure. Nothing with DRM can be secured. If you can't read it, then you don't know what it's doing, nor can you remove the botnet client from the DRM module (whether it was pre-installed in the DRM module, or installed later by someone who found one of its unfixable bugs).
You are talking about the current Kodi. The person you replied to is obviously talking about the proposed future Kodi, with a bunch of extra code that nobody needs. Cost without any mitigating gains.
It's forkin' time!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My kingdom for a supported, reliable Netflix add-on.
Legitimate, or DRM-encumbered? Can't have both.
Nonaggression works!