Hi everyone, we're a noprofit EU foundation devoted to promote the open source philosophy and spread its softwares.
The open sourcing of WebOS is certainly a good approach, but - in our opinion - if LG wanna seriously push its userbase/community the best move is to officially join open source softwares that are already widely adopted.
We're talking about Kodi, THE award-winning free and open source cross-platform software media player and entertainment hub for digital media !
So our suggestion for LG devs is to initially port a Kodi-specific distro - such as LibreElec - to "undertand" how implement the integration and, of course, to attract more indipendent devs.
Last but not least, check out this interesting article:
Let's be honest. One of Kodi's primary real world uses is watching content that people aren't legally entitled to. Facilitating or assisting that kind of content in their TVs likely isn't high on LG's list of priorities. They already have lots of apps that link to legitimate content sources or act as media players. It doesn't hurt to ask, but I wouldn't get your hopes up that this will get many cycles from anyone other than the dev community.
Your statement is analogous to saying that since cars are also used to make rapies and / or causes many deaths on the roads, then are barelly-legal: totally nonsense.
Not only, to us this sounds rather offensive for developers (that often acts as noprofit/volunteers), XBMC foundation as well as for all official Kodi sponsors (such as Nvidia, WeTek, Minix, etc): although it's true that SOMEONE uses the potentials of Kodi for "not always legal" purposes, it's also clear that it's the only other de facto "standard" for Digital Home Entertainment devices.
However, if LG isn't - wrongly according to us - interested, we strongly recommend them to release all the necessary code (including sources of all hardware drivers, of course) to allow third parties indipendent devs create ports.
Sorry if I ruffled your feathers. I understand your view, but I'm just saying that LG isn't likely to put any time or resources toward Kodi (my opinion, not confirmed or denied by LG). Despite offending you and potentially other volunteer developers, the truth still stands. Kodi is a prime platform for digital piracy. The ability to easily add plug-ins that access illegal content makes it an enticing platform for that type of activity. The whole platform shouldn't be punished because the developers of illegal content plug-ins have hijacked it, but it does add a negative connotation to the platform. Sadly, a lot of consumers think because a plug-in is available, it's legal to use it regardless of what it's doing.
The "truth" is enshrined in the official Kodi About page: It is an entertainment hub that brings all your digital media together into a beautiful and user friendly package. It is 100% free and open source, very customisable and runs on a wide variety of devices. It is supported by a dedicated team of volunteers and a huge community.
Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub that can be installed on Linux, OSX, Windows, iOS and Android, featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls.
It allows users to play and view most videos, music, podcasts, and other digital media files from local and network storage media and the internet.
Again: if YOU use it for piracy - as some people uses PS3 to rip SACDs - this not means that is an "hack tool" itself.
Last but not least, as any manufacturer shoud know, customers are ALWAYS right:
I will make this my last post because I have no intention of dragging this forum down into a debate on piracy.
Noble sounding and I applaud their efforts. However, the perception and use of Kodi is a much darker truth. I'm sure there are tons of people using it for just storing and streaming their non-DRM content. There are also tons of vendors selling Kodi boxes as "get everything free" devices. Look at their "official about" pages and you see them position themselves to avoid any legal piracy issues by not distributing copyrighted material or just providing links to the piracy add ons to Kodi.
Perception is 90% these days and Kodi has a bad image in a lot of the entertainment industry. That is a tough thing to overcome and ask mainstream electronics companies to build in their software.
Read CAREFULLY articles you posted, not just titles:
Wired: Kodi itself is just a media player; the majority of addons aren't piracy focused, and lots of Kodi devices without illicit software plug-ins are utterly uncontroversial.
TorrentFreak: The public awareness of Kodi and the easy ways with which it can be customised via builds and its open source nature makes it the perfect platform for Python coders. It’s easy to fork, copy, adapt and learn, and it’s good for “builders” who modify, personalize, and “brand”. It’s also easy for users to obtain, install, and work with the plethora of wizards and addons etc, all backed by up blogs and YouTube tutorials. It’s the perfect open source platform to develop and customise to access a massive range of content.
Variety: As a media center application, there is nothing illegal about Kodi software, which provides plug-ins for you to add YouTube and other OTT channels. Regrettably, however, there are also downloadable add-ons that take advantage of Kodi’s open-source platform.
Express: Research has suggested Kodi - which offers access to thousands of channels - is being used in more than five million UK homes. Kodi software is not illegal, but developers can produce third-party add-ons that provide free access to pirated and illegal content.
So, once again: your attacks to Kodi are totally nonsense and offensive for its devs.
Your - and media content providers' - energies should be used to fight piracy addons instead.
I'm not sure that I understand what you're asking for -- the way I read this, is that you want LG to spend their time porting an OS that isn't theirs, to hardware that isn't theirs, so that you can run Kodi on it?
Maybe you should explain what you're asking better, because I don't feel like I'm following you exactly.
@ericblade
Well, in short, we would simply hope that LG really and fully embrace the open source philosophy and community, which means actively collaborate with third-party projects in order to evolve all together (albeit with different purposes).
In this specific case, if LG decide to adopt Kodi as default media player/entertainment hub engine (of course customized for their needs - at first could be just a skin like this), they can acquire/share a very large user and developers base.
This would certainly bring benefits to both entities (LG and Kodi)...
I would love to have KODI installed on my LG TV, as much or even more than I love to have PLEX running smoothly in almost every device or even my PS3 / PS4 at home.
I hope LG could hear our prayers.
Thanks in advance.
I started building a client for Kodi that runs on Smart TV LG webos.
As a client, need a Kodi server running on local network to consume the JSON-RPC API.
Communicates through websockets.
It is being implemented in Javascript using REACT JS.
I'm looking for developers for the GUI.
Contributions are welcome!!
