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You may have noticed that I have been pretty short with people on the android help forum who have been moaning about not getting their dodgy add-on to work on their pre-installed xbmc ebay boxes.
I’ll tell you why.
I have been a HTPC enthusiast for years. Building machines and trying out numerous software. I remember times such as burning out processors in an effort to get the system silent and being pleased as punch at my fujitsu scaleo e case, even though it was a massive tank, especially compared to what we have now, it at least looked the part sitting under my TV.
I tried out different number of software, including windows MCE and media browser. But XBMC was a fit. I read up on it, tried it out, tested on my collection, etc, etc. Everything most of us have done when we moved on to xbmc.
I now have xbmc on windows, rikomagic mk802iv android stick, OUYA, Raspberry Pi and Pivos (running it linux image). All have its own requirements and quirks, but that is part of the fun, trying to get the unachievable perfect setup.
And this is why I have been short and blunt with some users. XBMC for a lot, especially those who have bought a pre-installed ebay box, has become nothing more than a piracy box.
It has becoming a crying shame.
Most of these users have never come to xbmc, like me, and no doubt like you, as enthusiasts, and just want to know why they can’t watch that dodgy film, from that dodgy add-on, and end-up blaming the hard working devs because its all xbmc’s fault.
I am currently trying to integrate retroarch android into xbmc, using a guide posted on these forums by a fellow enthusiast. And for me, this is what xbmc should be about.
Moan over :-)
"most" is debatable. I can't speak for the Android forum because I don't spend a lot of time there, but generally IMO piracy related questions are the minority.
Damned right. I've always been a bit of a geek, and a self-confessed obsessive compulsive when it comes to attention to detail and getting things 'perfect'.
I came across XBMC years ago and dismissed it at the time, but looking at Eden a couple of years ago got me interested again. We were strapped for cash and looking at ways of saving money. £100 per month on a Sky & LoveFilm subscriptions we were barely using just didn't cut it for me any more and FreeView is more than enough for us, and I started thinking of XBMC as a solution. I got it up and running, and still, a full year after getting things good enough (WAF) I'm still tweaking and fiddling all the time. First it was getting my movies library nice and neat, currently it's my music collection (I'm re-tagging using Media Monkey and dribbling in albums to XBMC as and when I do them).
Getting FreeView up and running was a recent project that (sort of) works with NextPVR and I'm also forever farting about with CDArt and am currently trying to get all those sorted out. It's so tuned to the obsessive compulsive in me and I love every minute of it. Recently, I've just discovered that some skins support disc art for movies as well, so guess what's next on the fiddle list.
Piracy never came into the equation for me when setting up my system, and whilst I'm no angel when it comes to these sort of things (I have no blu-ray drive so I use CouchPotato to get rips of Blu-Rays I already own), I always buy what I like, be it movies, music or shows and anything I don't like gets deleted. Ethical piracy? Hmmm...that's another discussion probably not for here.
So for me the initial push to get XBMC was how best to save some money legally (or at least semi-legally) and have the best looking media experience I could get.
That's what XBMC is to me, and to anyone who thinks XBMC is about nothing more than things like IceFilms, Navi-X, SportsDevil and so on can frankly, get stuffed.
Having said that, I would buy an Android box for ease of getting things running in bedrooms and so on, but they'd soon get wiped clean and installed with a standard Frodo or Gotham install...as it should've been in the first place.
(2014-02-20, 15:08)awp0 Wrote: [ -> ]"most" is debatable. I can't speak for the Android forum because I don't spend a lot of time there, but generally IMO piracy related questions are the minority.
Certainly most yes, you see lame webshops popping up like weeds in your lawn.
Mostly noticed so far are RPi solutions, RPi with XBMC bloated with all the addons you can think off that have a piracy issue.
(2014-02-20, 15:17)schumi2004 Wrote: [ -> ] (2014-02-20, 15:08)awp0 Wrote: [ -> ]"most" is debatable. I can't speak for the Android forum because I don't spend a lot of time there, but generally IMO piracy related questions are the minority.
Certainly most yes, you see lame webshops popping up like weeds in your lawn.
Mostly noticed so far are RPi solutions, RPi with XBMC bloated with all the addons you can think off that have a piracy issue.
"Lame webshops" does not equal "most new users". Like I said, it's debatable, but in my eyes the piracy related questions in these forums are the minority so by the OP's measure I would say it's not "most". They're highly noticeable though.
I am not talking about piracy related questions, I saying the uptake in xbmc from new users are ones who have bought pre-installed, addon bloated, xbmc boxes.
My bro-in-law bought one from ebay, after being recommended by a work collegue of his, as you can "watch all the latest stuff for free". He is tech illiterate, has no idea what xbmc is, how it works, what it does. Its point and click stuff for him.
If I want to buy a new android box, i'll be hard pressed to find one that isnt pre-installed with xbmc and piracy add-ons.
The android build has been fantastic, it has opened up a new avenue of home theaters and potential. Its unfortunately led to alot of dodgy stuff being sold and being bought by people who are not really supportive of xbmc's purpose and its developers.
I'm curious, so all of you have legitimately purchased all of your media and just made images of them and put them in your libraries?
Yes. All my films and tv shows are backups of dvd's and blu-rays I own. They are stored away in the garage.
Yeah, I don't know. There are a lot of issues at play here. Yes, there are a lot of crappy XBMC systems being sold. That's just the price you pay for being a popular, flexible and open system. Look at the plethora of $59 Android tablets. They look awesome until you realize that they're too slow, too low res, crappy battery life, and incapable of running newer versions of Android. The piracy add-ons make this worse, but they're certainly not the only source of problems with systems like these.
If this a criticism of new users who can't or won't try to solve their own problems then so be it, but that has nothing to do with piracy and there are a bazillion threads here from people asking similar newbie non-piracy questions.
If this is a criticism of users who want to use XBMC for piracy then I might agree with pisoj1 that the majority of users probably use it that way whether they break the forum rules to discuss it or not, and I don't think this is anything new. In this regard, the new users who are looking for help with piracy addons should be faulted only for breaking the forum rules and many of these people just didn't know any better (because they didn't bother to read the multitude of stickies). Yes, give them a hard time for it. Fine. But I'm not worried about the imminent demise of XBMC just because there are some sketchy web stores out there selling sketchy products to suckers.
its these pre-installed xbmc's and the dodgy add-ons that have made new users think xbmc and the dodgy add-ons are one of the same.
They haven't come into xbmc raw, learning as they go along. They have come in expecting things, mainly false promises from the sellers, which, as a result, have given little or no respect for the devs and the what "product" has accomplished and achieved to date.
(2014-02-20, 15:11)JesusOnEez Wrote: [ -> ]Damned right. I've always been a bit of a geek, and a self-confessed obsessive compulsive when it comes to attention to detail and getting things 'perfect'.
I came across XBMC years ago and dismissed it at the time, but looking at Eden a couple of years ago got me interested again. We were strapped for cash and looking at ways of saving money. £100 per month on a Sky & LoveFilm subscriptions we were barely using just didn't cut it for me any more and FreeView is more than enough for us, and I started thinking of XBMC as a solution. I got it up and running, and still, a full year after getting things good enough (WAF) I'm still tweaking and fiddling all the time. First it was getting my movies library nice and neat, currently it's my music collection (I'm re-tagging using Media Monkey and dribbling in albums to XBMC as and when I do them).
Getting FreeView up and running was a recent project that (sort of) works with NextPVR and I'm also forever farting about with CDArt and am currently trying to get all those sorted out. It's so tuned to the obsessive compulsive in me and I love every minute of it. Recently, I've just discovered that some skins support disc art for movies as well, so guess what's next on the fiddle list.
Piracy never came into the equation for me when setting up my system, and whilst I'm no angel when it comes to these sort of things (I have no blu-ray drive so I use CouchPotato to get rips of Blu-Rays I already own), I always buy what I like, be it movies, music or shows and anything I don't like gets deleted. Ethical piracy? Hmmm...that's another discussion probably not for here.
So for me the initial push to get XBMC was how best to save some money legally (or at least semi-legally) and have the best looking media experience I could get.
That's what XBMC is to me, and to anyone who thinks XBMC is about nothing more than things like IceFilms, Navi-X, SportsDevil and so on can frankly, get stuffed.
Having said that, I would buy an Android box for ease of getting things running in bedrooms and so on, but they'd soon get wiped clean and installed with a standard Frodo or Gotham install...as it should've been in the first place.
Sorry for offtopic, how have you managed to get the setup good enough (WAF). PM if this is too offtopic as I'm curious.
(2014-02-20, 16:24)riaz1982 Wrote: [ -> ]its these pre-installed xbmc's and the dodgy add-ons that have made new users think xbmc and the dodgy add-ons are one of the same.
They haven't come into xbmc raw, learning as they go along. They have come in expecting things, mainly false promises from the sellers, which, as a result, have given little or no respect for the devs and the what "product" has accomplished and achieved to date.
sadly this is the hard truth. i'm sure most of the people regularly visiting this forum would agree this is a bad sign/practise.
even worse is the people can't even delete those repos/addons because they came pre installed.
they can only be removed by using some file explorer or SSH into the box and deleting them
(2014-02-20, 16:24)riaz1982 Wrote: [ -> ]its these pre-installed xbmc's and the dodgy add-ons that have made new users think xbmc and the dodgy add-ons are one of the same.
They haven't come into xbmc raw, learning as they go along. They have come in expecting things, mainly false promises from the sellers, which, as a result, have given little or no respect for the devs and the what "product" has accomplished and achieved to date.
While I appreciate what XBMC was and has become today, I think it would be a bit presumptuous to expect the same of the average consumer. These are consumers who might buy an Apple TV for Netflix etc. Their requirements for a media box are most likely not as high as ours. We love configuring our setups and pride ourselves in maintaining and improving them. I think you can compare it to someone who loves cars vs someone who just has one as a necessity.
(2014-02-20, 16:28)Martijn Wrote: [ -> ] (2014-02-20, 16:24)riaz1982 Wrote: [ -> ]its these pre-installed xbmc's and the dodgy add-ons that have made new users think xbmc and the dodgy add-ons are one of the same.
They haven't come into xbmc raw, learning as they go along. They have come in expecting things, mainly false promises from the sellers, which, as a result, have given little or no respect for the devs and the what "product" has accomplished and achieved to date.
sadly this is the hard truth. i'm sure most of the people regularly visiting this forum would agree this is a bad sign/practise.
even worse is the people can't even delete those repos/addons because they came pre installed.
they can only be removed by using some file explorer or SSH into the box and deleting them
These addons are terrible... Hopefully we'll someday have something akin to a fully compatible and stable Netflix addon for XBMC - things will definitely become more and more interesting as we move towards HTML5. Will XBMC be supporting HTML5 with DRM?
Edit: I suppose the question is rather how it would/could be handled by XBMC.
(2014-02-20, 16:32)nooryani84 Wrote: [ -> ]These addons are terrible... Hopefully we'll someday have something akin to a fully compatible and stable Netflix addon for XBMC - things will definitely become more and more interesting as we move towards HTML5. Will XBMC be supporting HTML5 with DRM?
Edit: I suppose the question is rather how it would/could be handled by XBMC.
A fully working Netflix addon would be great.
An officially supported one would be better. Unfortunately I can't see that happening, at the moment anyway.
Believe it or not, these dodgy 3rd party add-ons have damaged the image of xbmc. Like I said in an earlier post, people are viewing xbmc and the add-ons as one of the same,
Why would a company like netflix be party to software that "looks" dodgy.
(2014-02-20, 16:44)riaz1982 Wrote: [ -> ]Believe it or not, these dodgy 3rd party add-ons have damaged the image of xbmc. Like I said in an earlier post, people are viewing xbmc and the add-ons as one of the same,
I'm sure this is true to some extent. But ask yourself this: Do you want a closed "walled garden" system with a curated (and limited) set of stable high performing white-listed add-ons? Or do you want the openness and flexibility that you have now which allows anyone to extend XBMC for all kinds of purposes, some of which are low-quality and/or illegal? It sounds like you want only the best of both models, but that is impossible.
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