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The other day when I tried to watch some live soccer channel on my Linux desktop computer with kodi v16.1, I only got the audio while the video showed a 3-D square field filled with lots of vertical square bars. Also, I noticed at the bottom left corner, it said something like playlist.m3u8. TBH, I have no idea what it was, but thought probably my kodi is missing some M3U8 codec addon to support an m3u8 video. So, does anyone here know how to resolve this issue?
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If my memory serves me right, it was on a FIFA TV Youtube addon from a newly installed Linux OpenSuSE 13.2 with kodi v16.1 on an old 32-bit computer/ I believe it is a legitimate source.
Also, I don't have an MLS Life account. However, when my friend who has this account tried it on my computer ends up with the same issue. He told me something is missing w.r.t my settings. Could it be I need to install some video codecs?
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I will give that a try. Thank you.
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a strm file should work as well, kodi handles playlists internally
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An m3u8 file is just a text file with the extension m3u or m3u8 if it's utf-8 encoded. Its basically a file with one or more pointers to some media for Kodi to play. Same with an strm file. It contains a pointer to an actual file to play.
Kodi will attempt to play pretty much any file, but if the file has errors in it, or your hardware is not up to the job of displaying it correctly, then you won't get the right results.
Please note that Kodi does not need any add-ons to play media. It comes with all the necessary stuff already included to play pretty much any sort of file (both video and audio) that you might come across.
As you stated that it's an old computer, it might be that the graphics card isn't up to the job of displaying the content you are trying to watch. The other thing is that you're running on OpenSuSE. Did you build Kodi yourself on that or is it a SuSE maintained package ?
Learning Linux the hard way !!
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m3u8 is a bit ambiguous since yes, it was originally just a m3u with utf-8 encoding. but these days it's also what carries the manifest in hls streams, and it might be what the OP wonders about. and there can be drm on these streams.
in either case the answer is you do not need any add-on as long as there is no nasty drm.