wsnipex from the Kodi project has built a snap of their super-popular entertainment centre application and pushed it to the edge channel. They put out a call for testing on their forum. I’m sure they’d appreciate additional testing and feedback there.
To install Kodi 18 Alpha 1, you should be able to just install as below, but there’s more detail over on the Kodi forum post.
snap install kodi --edge
I would also love to be able to run it on a pi. Not sure if mir-kiosk is the way to go there (@ogra, didn’t you have to use a forked repo to get it to work?) or if they can just use the fb directly.
Here’s the snapcraft file
In the discussion in the kodi forum the creator mentions that this package uses X11
While kodi can run on Mir, it is a build time option that excludes X11, so a different snap is needed(or multiple binaries). For now I’m focusing on the classic X11 on amd64 platform to get the basics working.
well, he enabled the mir plug but does not have
-DENABLE_MIR=on …
it also hadcodes a lot of x86-only dependencies that would need fixing and always builds the nvidia-vdpau bits …
i guess we’d need a “kodi-mir” snap here that has a tailored snapcraft.yaml specifically for mir-kiosk and armhf
Hi all.
There was some troubles wsnipex faced which he pointed out in the discussion in the Kodi forum.
E.g., he mentioned some thread-related restrictions of snaps.
Could somebody comment here or there?
I would love to see Kodi as snap.
Thanks
link?
We could comment if we knew what those troubles were, but it’s not easy to know that without a description of the problem.
Their forum is under maintenance now. I’ll report later (it was the same forum thread OP mentioned)
gotcha. I’ll try to check it when they get back online 
Thanks for following-up (also, sorry if I came across a bit abrasively in my previous post, I must do better!)
I don’t understand why there would be any need for a media player to increase it’s priority above normal. However, the process-control plug could potentially allow that. Someone else may have more ideas there. Regarding browsing outside the snap, with home, removable-media and possibly mount-observe you should be able to access most places you need.
I expect if you’re running a media player on a box which is also transcoding (or other tasks), you’d want the video playback to be a smooth as possible. So having the player able to request a higher priority over long running background things isn’t an unreasonable request.
surely in that case you can drop the priority of the transcode process rather than elevate the not-transcode process?
Only root processes can raise the priority (ie, go less than 0). If kodi is running a root daemon, they need only use process-control-- that will allow them to set arbitrary values.
kodi being initiated on startup - can we please fix so that systemd does not allow this ?
Some people use Kodi in headless mode. This headless mode is not in upstream for some reason, and they use a very simple patch to make Kodi work without a GUI.
To do so, they have a docker project at https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kodi-headless/ (source: https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-kodi-headless) which applies the patch and then recompiles Kodi.
There has been some discussion about this on the LXD forum and I believe that the easiest solution would be to adapt the existing snapcraft.yaml of Kodi to make a snap for Kodi Headless. Since Kodi Headless does not require any graphics suppose, it would be easy to take away all GUI dependencies.
Is anyone familiar enough with this to take it over? It would be much easier to install than the way of docker-headless.
