wow. what an old thread. i stumbled upon this looking for something else, and i remember using Kodi, back when it was still XBMC.
XBMC has never been stable. there are opinions of stable, but i don't consider anything stable unless i can open it, and use it from one end to the other without restarting it.
Nothing has changed in terms of stability.
It's been years since this thread started, and you know what's changed?? Nothing.
It is what it is. Kodi is a haugpaug of tons of random code, and random people's code.
the miracle of Kodi is not it's stability. it's simply that it can work under certain conditions.
A bare naked Kodi with no addons, might work with some degree of stability, but let's face it, Kodi without addons is like beer without alcohol-who gives a !@#$, and what's the point??
The addon architecture is pretty lousy being based on python, why on earth anyone would use python i don't know, but it's faster than java i supposed, and that's a plus.
Kodi will never be completely stable, because it's addon architectural is not stable, thus allowing users to create buggy addons, which can take down the entire system. addons can even destabilize Kodi to the point you have to reboot your computer. I've had to reboot twice today, because of kodi. until i finally decided i would just use taskkill from a remote terminal.
Streams will never be stable for Kodi either, because streams are constantly going up and down. links change, and just one letter off can ruin the whole link. People who use IPTV Stalker, IPTV Simple Client, or 3RD party video addons know this first hand.
Kodi has alot of poor handling of streams and links, and that's the fault of the coders, but it's not like we're paying for kodi. it's freeware, and as such expect freeware quality.
There are some major quirks that still exist today that i can't figure out why nobody has ever gotten around to fixing them.
1) Busy please wait, or working, Loading, whatever you want to call the wait state of kodi depending on your skin has always been a down fall of Kodi. When Kodi is in a wait state, you can't do anything, and the system locks up. There is no ability or support for parallel processing of events. meaning, you can't do crap until it's done. This one feature of Kodi that needs to go, or get fixed. NEVER let a wait state remove control from the user. that's just common sense. While every answer to the wait state design flaw has always been press esc or backspace, everyone reading this knows, and has experienced at one point or another that esc or backspace cannot immediately rescue from the wait state, and is for the most part, useless. especially in the face of a dead link, or error probing input file error. which brings me to the next design flaw.
2) the error probing input file error is notorious, and i gaurantee, present in everyone's log file at some point. This happens, because either the link is dead, or Kodi cannot determine the file type of the stream. where most media players succeed, Kodi fails, because if it cannot determine a file input type, it will simply give up, or lock up. In no event will Kodi simply guess, or assume a file type in cannot determine. Unlike say Media Player Classic which will guess, and a majority of the time succeed in playing the format. even if you change the suffix to something like, thisfilewontwork.fail. MPC can overlook extension and determine by content type, and throw some pretty good guesses at content type. Kodi needs this ability bad. The ability to guess content type is detrimental. If at the very least, a user should be given an option to attempt to determine the content type. if input probe file type fails for a stream, just ask the user to guess, mp4, flv, mpeg, h264. if either the ability to choose one of those as a guess, or let Kodi automatically cycle through those guesses, then there would be a lot less streaming errors.
3) Old code. Kodi is made out of old Kode, and these days, unlike in my day, people don't like to face the fact when something doesn't work well, and will not do a rewrite. people hate rewrites, and kodi is in bad need of one. in many departments.
If the developers would stop and think, man only if i knew then what i now, and realize, they do know then. all you have to do is go back and rewrite, and apply what you know now. Kodi is full of workarounds, sloppy code, and bug cover ups. instead of fixing the bug itself usually inherent to the design, they seem to like patching it up with glue, rubber cement, and rubber patches, instead of going back and rewriting the design structure which lead to the bug in the first place.
4) Too many people change shifts working on Kodi. All the people who started XBMC are not the same people working on Kodi. Some of them are, but a lot of people come and go. contributing here and there. When there is a turn over rate involved with programming there's always a sense of starting over, and or picking up where somewhere left off, and the new generation of coders rarely capture the spirit of the original crew. Often times lacking the skills and experience of the predecessors as well.
such is the case with Windows. Windows was great in it's day. 3.1, wow. 95, amazing, 98 neat, ME fancy(but buggy and bloated), XP fancy and bloated, but stable, and fast. Vista slow ass hell, buggy, bloated, and a basically a modern ME, windows 7, slightly better than vista in terms of performance, but severely bloated, severely inefecient, and things like html based system windows, and an excess of windows(like the 4CLICKS it takes to change the time, as opposed to when it only took 2). windows 7 was basically a mouse driven commercial which lead to the greatest microsoft fail off all time. windows 8. windows 8 was so bad the guy responsible got fired, and covered it up by "resigning." we all know that in the corporate world "resigning." is like seppuku. "you're fired, but we'll let you walk, and retain your honor instead of us killing you-you must kill yourself." so the guy responsible for 8 committed corporate seppuku.
you see, as the generations of coders passed windows is no longer what it was when it started. as people change the product changes, and such is the nature of Kodi. Kodi has it's peaks and vallies, ups and downs. fails, and success. -And it's always morphing depending on who's putting in all the work. One day it will be great, then it will suck balls, then a few years later it will be great again.
I've been using XBMC since it first came out, but it's always the same routine with me and XBMC. i test it out, drive around a little bit, get tired of the crashes and dead links, uninstall it, and wait a few years to come back and see how well it's doing. Everytime i leave XBMC i leave for about a year or so, and come back when i know things have really changed. while the face, skins, and addons change, the underlying stability never changes. -And until someone puts some serious money into it, it never will.
It will keep changing and sucking and failing and inspiring and streaming and adding tons of new useless features and growing and bloating and getting bigger and bigger on your hard disk untill one day Kodi will be so bloated you'll need an entire drive just to install it, and have a few streams and TV channels going. But that's not because kodi itself is the blob consuming all of humanity and everything in it's path, it's because we keep handing the torch to a younger generation of less experienced, and less talented coders. who we should be teaching, that speed, efficiency, logic, and stability is the key to programming, not just making it work. most people these days don't care about speed and efficiency, because of how fast processors have gotten. there's so much waste in the code these days. When i was a young spry coder in my day(i was born the same year as the 8088) we had a whole different set of ethics to programming.
for starters you had to be a genius and or of high IQ. not just anybody could jump into the coding arena, because there wasn't a slew of easy to write programming languages.
I was an assembler. I do machine language, c++, and pascal. You don't see many full on assemblers anymore. most of us are working for hardware companies, or retired already.
When we wrote procedures, we used clock procedures before and after every function and procedure we wrote to time how long it took to execute our procedures so we could squeeze every little millisecond out of our tiny 8 and 16BIT processors. Nobody times their procedures anymore. Nobody is obsessed with speed like we were. If we had to choose between writing a procedure and losing a few milliseconds to make the procedure call, or hardcore the procedure inside our program block just to gain the few ms, we'd go for the speed of saving a few milliseconds, and only make procedure calls when we had to.
The reason im giving you this history lesson is because Kodi reflects the very spirit of the modern programmer, and what they're teaching in schools these days. Most of us back then were so hardcore we already knew our stuff before we even got to a college class, because we were obsessed with the science of it all. -And thus i can say back then, most if not all programmers were scientists. Today programmers are not limited to scientists and nerds. Anyone can pick up a book, and with enough brain cells, write some code. I've seen a lot of people coding who shouldn't be coding, but at the same time, if we ALL knew how to code, this world would be just that much smarter.
5) There's no money in it. Nobody's really getting paid, and what we have is a program that is written in spare time, not $$$$ time. You can bet if there was someone who's lively hood depended on Kodi, and writing bad software meant you weren't going to make rent, or make your bills, or afford food, or get laid, you bet your @$$ Kodi would be some stable hardcore ghost in the shell looking shit, but it's not. it's free, we're(coders of the freeware) all putting as much we can in our spare time, and still trying to hold down jobs, and pay our rent.
Not that it matters much, or that a single developer from the kodi core will ever see this, but there's an infinite potential in Kodi. If kodi was solid, stable, tight, super fast, slim, and efficient to the quality that a company could steak it's reputation on it, you guys could sell Kodi. You'd be rich as hell for it too. Not that i'm telling you to sell out, but i'm saying even though nobody gets paid for Kodi, it doesn't mean nobody can get paid for Kodi, you know what i mean??
So if any Dev team is reading this. You're not doing bad for a bunch of youngsters trying to keep the code free, but remember that in computer science, you can ALWAYS do better, and you can ALWAYS make it faster. Right now Kodi is something that just works. it's written to work. -But push harder, and you can write something 1337. every line of code should always be a work of art, perfection, speed, and boolean marvel. -Because programming is not just a science, it's an art, and a craft.
-And as for the guy who started this thread, who i doubt is still even around using this software anymore, keep coming back and checking every year or two, eventually they will do something you really like. I was gone for about 2YEARS or so, and when i came back I found they had added IPTV capabilities, and that was enough to keep me around, and dealing with the headaches just to see how far i could push it's capabilities, and explore through the changes. I'm still waiting on hardcore code optimizations, but for now, IPTV has me entertained. Even if i delete it, you know i'll be back later just to see what kind of changes they've made.
