Kodi 18 Leia Nearly Released, But For Now An RC5

[Michael_S]

Because it's the last good version of Windows!
I don't like the Windows 8 touchscreen interface and I don't like Windows 10 built-in trackware, spyware and other kind of crapware that is there.
And I don't give a fuck about what Microsoft says about EOL. They are so pushing with what they do that nowadays are even shittier than mafia.
It's not like Windows 7 will stop functioning past that date.
And let me ask you one thing that I'm curious, does the hardware decoding of Kodi work on Windows 8 or 10 for videos encoded with HEVC (H.265) 10bit ?

The only operating system that I'll be upgrading to from Windows 7 is Linux, but unfortunately Linux is far behind with the quality and user friendliness with those bullshit password requests every 2 minutes compared to Windows 7.
So, I think Windows 7 will survive on my computer as base for Kodi for more years.
I'm not upgrading to spyware for them.

I bought an $80 Android TV box. There are dozens or hundreds of choices. I went with a Khadas Vim 2, but I really couldn't tell you how it compares to other options. I put Kodi on that, connected it to my television, and stream my H.265 encoded videos to it without problems. I've had it for years now. It works with my regular TV remote.

With respect to Linux, it's been my primary operating system for years. I've got it on two desktops and two laptops. I don't have Windows partitions any more. I don't know what you mean by "bullshit password requests every 2 minutes". I have to type a password when I apply software updates, which is about twice a week, and when I install new software. That happens barely once a month. What else do you need passwords for? I have a menu in the corner of my screen that works like the Windows 7 menu listing programs, a task manager, a volume control, a network status icon, and applications like Firefox, Chrome, LibreOffice, Kodi, MakeMKV (a DVD/Blu Ray ripper that you have to buy), VLC, Thunderbird, and Steam with my Steam games.

Using Linux for video games is more work. My gaming machine has Ubuntu Mate and it's dead easy to install Steam and my Steam games. But to get the best game options I have to monkey with Steam Proton and to get the best game performance I have to fiddle with Wine-D3D9 and Mesa installations. And there are still plenty of games for Windows that won't work on Linux or will run much more slowly on Linux. So if you're a dedicated PC gamer, stick with Windows and best of luck to you. (No sarcasm intended.)

Linux distributions are typically not lower quality than Windows. Windows Update wrecked my last Windows partition in the early fall, and I just didn't care enough to reinstall. Windows Update wrecked my brother's Windows installation last month, and since he's a PC gamer he did reinstall. Linux software updates never wrecked my installation, in more than five years of use. It came close once with an obscure distribution called sidduction, but they posted an apology on their website and instructions on how to fix it. The instructions worked. And that was five or more years ago.

[ermo]

The only operating system that I'll be upgrading to from Windows 7 is Linux, but unfortunately Linux is far behind with the quality and user friendliness with those bullshit password requests every 2 minutes compared to Windows 7.

If you're using a GUI, you can edit the password nagging policy to allow group membership to pass as authentication instead.

If you mean sudo, you can change the sudo configuration to not require a password for certain group members.

So if the "bullshit password requests" are your primary reason to hang onto W7, maybe it's time to dip your foot into Linux land again?

[skeevy420]

Linux distributions are typically not lower quality than Windows. Windows Update wrecked my last Windows partition in the early fall, and I just didn't care enough to reinstall. Windows Update wrecked my brother's Windows installation last month, and since he's a PC gamer he did reinstall. Linux software updates never wrecked my installation, in more than five years of use. It came close once with an obscure distribution called sidduction, but they posted an apology on their website and instructions on how to fix it. The instructions worked. And that was five or more years ago.

That's happened three times to me in the past two years. Reinstalled twice, said screw it the last time (April last year). The only bad Linux updates I've ever had were a couple of Ubuntu & Debian dist-upgrades over 10 years ago (or why I became an Arch Linux user). Arch has only broke when I didn't pay attention and didn't catch DKMS building ZFS before SPL (now they're merged into one module so that won't happen again) or didn't catch that the newest kernel didn't compile with ZFS (why I keep two kernels installed and upgrade them individually).

SIduction is Debian Sid. It might be two steps above DebianXFCE's Franken-desktop on a good day. Running a system from testing or unstable repositories has it's risks is all I'm getting at.

[skeevy420]

If you're using a GUI, you can edit the password nagging policy to allow group membership to pass as authentication instead.

If you mean sudo, you can change the sudo configuration to not require a password for certain group members.

So if the "bullshit password requests" are your primary reason to hang onto W7, maybe it's time to dip your foot into Linux land again?

Funny. All the password "nagging" is why I prefer Linux. Only I can mess with my system and I don't have to worry about some jackass clicking the "Yes, I'm an Admin" button to FUBAR everything.

[Michael_S]

SIduction is Debian Sid. It might be two steps above DebianXFCE's Franken-desktop on a good day. Running a system from testing or unstable repositories has it's risks is all I'm getting at.

But even with Siduction, the devs only messed up once and I ran it for a few years.

If you're using a GUI, you can edit the password nagging policy to allow group membership to pass as authentication instead.

If you mean sudo, you can change the sudo configuration to not require a password for certain group members.

So if the "bullshit password requests" are your primary reason to hang onto W7, maybe it's time to dip your foot into Linux land again?

In his defense, doing either of those things is a bit of a hassle for someone not accustomed to using the command line.

I'm a tech veteran, using the command line is as natural as using a mouse to me. But people these days that grew up with Windows or OS X or Android gadgets or iPhones don't know it and almost all of them don't care to learn.

But I think my point stands - even if you leave the security configuration at the defaults, you should only have to enter a password a few times a week.

[Danny3]

If you're using a GUI, you can edit the password nagging policy to allow group membership to pass as authentication instead.

If you mean sudo, you can change the sudo configuration to not require a password for certain group members.

So if the "bullshit password requests" are your primary reason to hang onto W7, maybe it's time to dip your foot into Linux land again?

Yes, I'm using a GUI most of the time, except for the time that I'm forced to use the command line.
I don't even know, I'm asked for my password a lot of times, from install/uninstall programs, applying updates, changing control panel things, editing config files. I don't even know how many times I'm nagged to enter my password, but it's definitely a lot and very annoying.
Editing config files could've been reduced to be once being asked for password if the file manager had the ability to start as root, but no, the developers removed that feature for the sake of security.
The "bullshit password requests" could've been turned to a clickable "Run with administrator privileges" as Windows does (also displaying a shield icon) instead of the stupidity of asking for the full password.
What's even more stupid is the fact that all this nagging made me to shorten my password to one character, and for sure I find it impossible to ever create a secure long password knowing that I will be asked to type it so many times and lose so much time compared to a simple click.
This is one of the reasons I can't put a Linux distro on my parents computers instead of Windows 7 and try to explain to them this big annoyance when even I don't find a good reason for it.
And sorry but I don't know how to edit edit the password nagging policy to allow group membership to pass as authentication instead and I don't have time to read lengthy tutorials about it.
Thanks anyway for all the help!

[ermo]

Funny. All the password "nagging" is why I prefer Linux. Only I can mess with my system and I don't have to worry about some jackass clicking the "Yes, I'm an Admin" button to FUBAR everything.

Oh, I do get it. Convenience <-> Security/Control are traditionally considered opposites on the usability scale I'm afraid.

Anyway, this thread was supposed to be about Kodi, not authentication policy and Windows 7.

[Danny3]

..........
Linux distributions are typically not lower quality than Windows. Windows Update wrecked my last Windows partition in the early fall, and I just didn't care enough to reinstall. Windows Update wrecked my brother's Windows installation last month, and since he's a PC gamer he did reinstall. Linux software updates never wrecked my installation, in more than five years of use. It came close once with an obscure distribution called sidduction, but they posted an apology on their website and instructions on how to fix it. The instructions worked. And that was five or more years ago.

I was not talking about the quality of the kernel or the default installed programs, which I believe they are actually higher quality that what Windows comes with.
For the lower quality of Linux distros I mean that Windows 7 has:
1. Good defaults like multi-monitor default behaviour which is "clone" I think instead of Linux extend to right or left which is pure guesswork and almost never guesses correctly.
2. Good window control buttons (minimize, maximize, close) design (big, rectangle shape, red color close) instead of small, round shape, and not and not always red close button.
3. Partition letters, icons and free space progress bar instead of mount points like /media/my-username/partition-label/
So Windows have very simple partition letters (very easy to type in commands or paths) and partiton name which can be naything easy to remember.
4. Easy to configure audio output and input devices, where very easily can configure the number of channels like 2.0 or 5.1.
5. Control panel is very well organized with search result getting you to the right searched item instead of Linux distro finding results only one level deep.
6. Very easy to find a list of all installed programs with version, size, date of installation columns
7. Built in virtual keyboard which is very easy to find (open Start menu -> type first 3 letters from keyboard, e.g.: "key" and it appears) compared to Linux where it's either not installed or never can be found from the start menu typing the full "keyboard" or "virtual".
I'm gonna stop here, because the list I think it can go up to 100 points where Windows 7 does it right, while Linux distros have reinvented it in a broken way that hurts intuitivity, usability and productivity.
That's why I'm saying that Windows 7 has a higher quality compared to Linux distros.

As for Windows update, I think everybody knows that Microsoft is so sleazy these days that they intentionally break older version of Windows to push people to their spyware flaghsip.
As for updates, i never had a breaking OS update on windows, but I had it on Linux. So I think everyone has a different experience here.

[Danny3]

Blah Blub personal opinions vs Kodi devs would waste resources on a EOL OS

Could you stop with this EOL crap? Are you working for Microsoft.
The decoding stuff should be about the GPU and the software for it (the driver), both are recent, from 2018.
So, please stop with this devs waisting resources with the OS, when it's not about the OS, but the software connecting to the GPU through its driver and asking it to decode the video.

[starshipeleven]

I am not really interested of Kodi news now as I was in the past.
Looking for more info why Kodi 18 can't do hardware decode for videos encoded with HEVC (H.265) 10bit on my Windows 7

I find this somewhat strange as it's using ffmpeg as a backend, and last time I checked ffmpeg works the same on Windows 7 as it does on Windows 10.

If it does not work on Win7 then it won't work on Win10 either, they either disabled that in their own ffmpeg library as it is not "stable enough" for your hardware or there are some other issues in your PC/drivers/whatnot.

For example, on Linux your setup should work fine as long as you are using a distro that provides new-enough dependencies https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php...455#pid2767455

HDR won't work, but that's because HDR in general does not really work on Linux, not a Kodi issue.

I don't understand why after all these years Kodi is still so far behind MPC-HC, when it comes to playback, even though MPC-HC is open source and they could see what MPC-HC is doing there that is so awesome or even copy it.

I do, because I'm awesome like that.

MPC-HC is not using ffmpeg but DirectShow (the windows media framework thing that needs you to install codecs).
You might want to try Kodi DSP (which is a fork that uses a DirectShow based player) https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=223175

I don't even want to talk about the fact that MPC-HC can even use madVR, which makes the playback even more awesome.

madVR is a DirectShow video renderer. http://www.madvr.com/

As such it will never ever ever ever ever ever be supported by Kodi upstream as it's not using DirectShow in any way. Meanwhile Kodi DSP supports it.

For multiple users, I mean other Windows users (standard, guest) which I don't want to give the password from my account (where I'm administrator) just to use Kodi on their profile.

I'm not sure about wtf is the issue here as Kodi works like any other modern program you install. All user data used by Kodi is stored in user folders already, https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Instal...ndows#Userdata
If a user starts Kodi application from their own user it will use their own user data, no need to set up another profile or give admin passwords to other users.

At most you will need to copy over the same config so they can all access the same sources (your NAS or other streaming services) if it's something so hard that you can't just set it up multiple times.

Linux is far behind with the quality and user friendliness with those bullshit password requests every 2 minutes compared to Windows 7.

FYI: Just as you can disable or change the frequency you will get UAC password popups on Windows, you can change that for Linux too.
It usually requires adding the applications to the group they need to use to work so they won't require root access anymore.

But I have a hard time believing it is an issue to begin with. Maybe you chose a crappy distro, maybe Ubuntu?