Kodi on Pinephone
#1
If you look in the software repositories of your Pinephone compatible distro the FOSS app Kodi is probably found if installing desktop apps are enabled.
Kodi is more a framework for plugins from commercial subscription streaming to game emulation and many others, it comes with with a built in multimedia playback capability which can play most media files.
The one difficulty I have found with using Kodi for playback vs any other media player including the stock one in Mobian is that the Kodi mobile skins I have tried to use expect an android home key or something else emulating a backspace.
Is there anyone who has found an easy to use skin for Kodi which provides the missing [back] signal somehow?
Any other Kodi related ideas especially reducing the battery usage for video playback(better utilizing hardware decoding?) would be appreciated!
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#2
How easy is it to fork a kodi skin to add a back button? I've not tried, so for all I know there are gotchas along the way.
https://kodi.wiki/view/Skinning_Manual#Button_Control

If it could be made configurable, or autodetect whether to show the button, an existing theme might accept a patch. Some themes have turned down similar requests as they consider it out of scope though ("We target remote controls. If you're using a mouse then pick a different theme." and similar)
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#3
(11-28-2021, 04:39 AM)wibble Wrote: How easy is it to fork a kodi skin to add a back button? I've not tried, so for all I know there are gotchas along the way.
https://kodi.wiki/view/Skinning_Manual#Button_Control

If it could be made configurable, or autodetect whether to show the button, an existing theme might accept a patch. Some themes have turned down similar requests as they consider it out of scope though ("We target remote controls. If you're using a mouse then pick a different theme." and similar)
Thanks, sadly I didnt see a way to insert a back/backspace into a customized skin.
I hate to follow down the android style route but maybe hacking together a custom keyboard map for multimedia remote controls as a KB option, but then there would be a way to easily control kodi.
There would still be the issue of using up most of the battery with a 1 hour video, same problem if I can coerce VLC to play a video; the stock Totem based Videos player in Mobian has never played a video for me so remains untested, but years ago Totem was one of the first apps I would uninstall.  I suspect this is due to CPU vs GPU decoding of the stream.
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