Articles about Kodi

Kodi is under the spotlight for third-party add-ons that allow pirated content, but it’s far from being the only way for users to view illegal TV shows and movies.

Roku has a feature called 'private channels' (also referred to as 'hidden channels') that is designed to allow developers to test their creations ahead of making them available through Roku’s own store. Perhaps inevitably though, some of these channels are being used to stream pirated (or adult) content, and Roku isn’t happy.

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Kodi is one of the best media centers available. Its cross-platform nature makes it usable on many different operating systems. Not only is it good for locally stored music and video, but with the use of add-ons, the sky is the limit. Fans of Premier League Football (soccer), for instance, can use Kodi to watch matches.

Where Kodi really shines, however, is with Linux. More specifically, the best experience is when the media center is the star of the show. Luckily, there are some Linux distros that exist solely to run Kodi. One such popular distro is LibreELEC -- a fork of OpenELEC. Today, an update to that operating system becomes available and you can download it immediately. There are images available for Raspberry Pi, WeTek, and of course, x86_64.

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It has been difficult to avoid talk of Kodi for one reason or another recently, and it's something that's likely to be on the lips of fans of UK football now the 2017/18 Premier League season has started up.

Watching pirated streams of football matches through IPTV providers and other services has long been a popular use for Kodi, and the English Premier League (EPL) has had enough. The organization previously obtained a High Court order blocking illegal streams in real-time, and a more recently obtained injunction extended this ability. With the new season now under way, football fans are discovering that they now need a VPN like IPVanish to get their fix.

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Kodi has been in the news a lot lately, and not for the best reasons. While the software itself isn’t illegal, using third-party add-ons to watch copyrighted content is, and many of those add-ons have been pulled recently following threats of legal action. Controversial add-on site TVAddons even vanished briefly from the web, before reappearing a week ago.

Despite all this, it’s business as usual for the Kodi Foundation which does its best to distance itself from the piracy accusations so often leveled at it, and the team has just released a new build for the popular open source media player.

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It has been hard to avoid stories about Kodi in recent months as broadcasters and copyright holders panic about the software's potential for piracy.  The controversial site TVAddons was the subject of a lawsuit from Dish Network, and shortly after this it disappeared from the web completely.

Rather than originating from the US as many people suspected, the lawsuit against TVAddons that led to its disappearance comes from Canadian telecoms firms Bell Canada, TVA, Videotron and Rogers. Now TVAddons is back, but the story about its legal battle -- involving claims of piracy of Game of Thrones -- is rather more complicated than just about anyone could have thought.

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Kodi is a very flexible media center that you can use to watch local media, or stream content via third-party add-ons.

If you share Kodi with other family members you can set up user profiles for each person who uses the software. This will let you all keep what you watch separate and you can control what content your children have access to.

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A survey by the BBC reveals that over a third of Premier League football (or soccer, if you insist) fans are getting their gaming fix using unofficial (that is, illegal) online streams.

Kodi boxes and similar dedicated devices are used by more than a quarter of fans for this very purpose. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is younger adults who are more likely to make use of illegal streams.

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Kodi itself isn’t illegal, but using third-party add-ons to watch copyrighted content is. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen some developers pull their add-ons in the face of legal action, and 'fully-loaded' Kodi boxes have been in the firing line for a while.

So far ordinary Kodi users have escaped scrutiny, but that could be about to change as a major anti-piracy organization has expressed its intention to come after end users in "the very near future."

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In recent weeks numerous Kodi add-ons have disappeared, and the popular site TVAddons also suffered the same fate. It had been presumed that the disappearances were related to a lawsuit taken out by Dish Network, and now the broadcaster has been granted subpoenas to help identify those developing the ZemTV Kodi addon and running the TVAddons website.

The subpoenas relate to a number of online services including Facebook and Twitter, and successfully identifying defendants will be key to the success with any lawsuits relating to copyright infringement.

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Kodi does a great job of playing audio and video. However, if you prefer VLC Media Player, the good news is you can use that to watch all (or just some) of your Kodi content.

The process of redirecting playback is very straightforward, and once set up you can choose which player to use on a per-case basis. This gives you the best of both worlds. You can use Kodi to choose what to play, and then benefit from all the features that VLC offers, including all of its effects and filters.

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The negative attention that Kodi has been attracting recently continues. A number of high-profile add-ons, such as Phoenix, have disappeared recently as interest in the piracy potential for the media player increases.

The latest victim appears to be TVAddons, a site which lists unofficial Kodi add-ons. The site was sued last week in a federal court in Texas, so the disappearance is not entirely surprising. But the removal of DNS records -- rendering the site inaccessible -- without any explanation is a little strange.

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Kodi -- built from the ashes of XBMC -- remains a popular but controversial streaming media solution. The beauty of the software is that it allows for the streaming of just about anything, and that includes contents of questionable legality (oh, OK... let's just admit there are a bunch of add-ons that can be used to stream pirated content).

There has been a great deal of legal interest in so-called "fully-loaded" Kodi boxes of late, and this has had something of an unfortunate side-effect -- for fans of certain add-ons at least. Seemingly fearful of the legal implication of what their add-ons make possible, the developers of numerous well-known plugins are closing down. One of the latest is the popular Phoenix add-on.

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Kodi has really hit it big in the past couple of years. While the home theater software is great for playing local content, its rise in popularity is largely down to Kodi's support for third-party add-ons that make it possible to stream any audio and video, including the latest blockbuster movies and TV shows.

The process for installing third-party add-ons varies depending on the add-on, but assuming you’re running Kodi 17 Krypton (or later), we'll show you the easiest way to install all of the most popular ones.

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Kodi -- the software previously known as XBMC -- is a cross-platform media center solution that many people enjoy daily. Quite frankly, its not hard to see why it has become so ubiquitous -- it has tons of features, a great user interface, and the ability to gain new functionality with addons.

While the program is 64-bit on macOS, Android, and Linux desktop operating systems, Windows has remained a 32-bit affair. According to the developers, the transition to 64-bit on Windows was not seen as a priority. Finally, however, after many years of users requesting a 64-bit Windows program, it is here. Well, technically, it is still a nightly development release, but users can download that immediately and begin using it. A stable release will be here soon, with a UWP version much further out.

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If you are looking for a dedicated media box for your living room or bedroom, the first thing you should consider is Kodi. This is a media center software package that delivers a very focused consumption experience. It can even be customized with "addons," although some of them can be used for piracy -- something we do not condone.

Unfortunately, Kodi is not its own operating system, meaning it has to be run on top of an OS. Sure, you could use Windows 10, but that is overkill if you only want to run Kodi. Instead, a lightweight Linux distribution that only serves to run the media center is preferable. One of the most popular such distros is OpenELEC. It can run on traditional PC hardware, but also Raspberry Pi, and, my favorite -- WeTek boxes. Today, version 8.0.4 achieves stable release. It is a fairly ho-hum update, focusing mostly on fixes and stability.

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