Kodi is one of the most common media center software in the market. It’s a free and open source application that came to life way back in 2003 as XBMC a media center app for the first-gen Xbox but has since been available as an application for almost all major platforms including Android, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, and Windows. Kodi provides an interface that easily access all your media including videos, photos, music stored on a hard drive, optical disc, local network, as well as on the Internet. It uses a 10-foot user interface and a remote control as a primary input device.
[ad type=”banner”]Download and Install Kodi
Assuming that we have already upgraded your Ubuntu box to version 16.04, here’s a set of commands that we want to run in order to install Kodi:
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kodi
The above code works fine means the latest version of the media center application will be installed on your system. For example, version 16.1 is the latest stable version was installed, somewhat which I we confirmed by running the following command:
$ kodi –version
16.1 Git:c327c53 Media Center Kodi
Copyright (C) 2005-2013 Team Kodi – http://kodi.tv
Basic Setup
Once the download/installation part is complete, head to the Unity Dash and launch Kodi from there.
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
On the home screen, we will see a horizontal menu displaying several options/categories including Videos, Music, Pictures, Programs, and more.
once Kodi is set-up properly the Videos section will let we browse and play all the videos that the application detects on your system. same for Music, and so on.
Watching Local Content
To make your local content visible to Kodi, click on the relevant option and then click ‘Files‘ sub option. Complete the set-up that follows, and we will see your content listed in the media player’s interface. For example, the following screen-shots were taken while adding videos stored on my HDD to Kodi:
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
To play a video file, just click on the listing. For example, we clicked on the ‘Linkin Park.mp4‘ file listed in the window shown above, and the playback started.
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
Relatively a few settings related to playback for example, whether or not we need subtitles can be accessed from the playback window itself. So, we learned how to make your local videos visible to Kodi. we can follow similar steps to make your local music files and photos discoverable.
Installing Add-ons
In this example that explains how to browse YouTube content from Kodi. The first step here is to click on the ‘Add-ons‘ sub-option (instead of the ‘Files’ sub-option) under the Videos category on the application’s home page. Assuming this is the first time we playing with add-ons, no add-ons will be displayed, with only a ‘Get more‘ option that helps to install them.
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
Click on ‘Get more‘ and we will see a list of add-ons available. Scroll this list and select ‘YouTube‘.
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
As we click on ‘YouTube,’ the add-on will be installed. But, we need to set it up, which basically involves authorize it to access your YouTube account:
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
Once the authorization step is over, we will be able to access YouTube content from Kodi.
How to Install and Set up Kodi in Ubuntu 16.04
This way, we can install other available add-ons to access media content from the Internet.
Tips and Tricks
- Kodi requires to name your media files in a particular format as it helps media scrapers to pick up the correct information.
- Ensure that your videos, music, and photos are kept in separate directories. This will help avoid unnecessary problems when we ask Kodi to scan media on your system.
- Basic settings can be accessed from System->Settings on the home screen, the configuration file(s) are located in $HOME/.kodi/ folder on your system we advised not make any changes in this folder.