Tag: XBMC

And Finally the working My Subscriptions page with working thumbnails

Kodi YouTube plugin broken – *FIX*

John Large 46 Comments

Update 11th August 2017
**If you are having issues with youtube on kodi not showing your subscriptions or videos & loading blank pages, I recommend you download the new YouTube plugin respository from here. Install the repository on Kodi and update the youtube plugin to the latest version, currently YouTube for Kodi 5.4.2. **

Recently Bromix, the developer of the awesome YouTube addon for Kodi decided to quit the project & concentrate on other things. This quickly lead to the addon breaking, days after he announced he was leaving the project. As yet nobody has taken up the reigns on this plugin. Over the past few days the plugin has been broken, with the My Subscriptions tab breaking and thumbnails failing to load. If you use this addon like me you will rely heavily on the My Subscriptions tab. I subscribe to a lot of YouTube channels & tend to watch this in the evening with my wife over watching traditional TV. The My Subscriptions tab essentially brings together all of the latest videos (in order) from every youtuber you subscribe to. Read More....

OmnieVESA raspberry pi mount & temporary paperclips

Raspberry Pi 2 – First Impressions

John Large 1 Comment

I finally got a chance to order a Raspberry Pi 2 a few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to post about it for a while but I’ve been extra busy. I ended up picking the Pi up from The Pi Hut after really struggling to track one down on the high street. As always the service from The Pi Hut was great & a few days later my new Pi arrived.

Top view of Raspberry Pi 2

It’s hard to believe that the Raspberry Pi team have managed to squeeze so much power out of the same form factor & price point. The fact that it’s a quad-core means that everything feels much snappier. Less like a mega budget hobby machine & more like a mid range desktop PC. It will always be limited by processing power & RAM, not to mention raw graphic processing, but when you consider the price point & opportunity to try any project you like for very little financial outlay the Raspberry Pi will always be a great machine. Read More....

kodi Youtube Addon

Raspberry Pi & Openelec – A good combination.

John Large 6 Comments

I’ve had my rev. B+ Raspberry Pi for just over a year since it’s release. When i got it I had a few projects on the go, including a sickbeard/sabnzbd/couchpotato server and a few media centres. At the time I had XBMC Frodo running on my Apple TV 1 via Crystalbuntu and on my ATV2 by Jailbreaking & installing. Both solutions worked perfectly so the unstable XBMC on the Pi wasn’t really worth pursuing. Also I had issues controlling with a keyboard & a Flirc when the ATV’s utilized the ATV remote so well. Read More....

Rii i8 wireless Keyboard for openelec kodi

Rii i8 mini 2.4GHz wireless keyboard for Openelec on Raspberry Pi

John Large 3 Comments

Rii i8 wireless Keyboard for openelec kodi

This week I finally took the plunge and bought a small wireless keyboard for the Raspberry Pi. The Pi in question is a B+ raspberry pi running at 700MHz and sporting 512MB ram. I’ve got a 32GB Sandisk Class 10 SD card in it and one of the excellent Pibow cases from Pimoroni.

Up until a few weeks ago I’d been using an Apple TV 1 as my main media centre (upgraded with a CrystalHD hardware video decoder & running XBMC) and a Jailbroken ATV2 as my backup. The Apple TV one is great, it’s fast & snappy but it’s a bit of a power hog & can take a while to boot up. Also Crystalbuntu is yet to be upgraded to Kodi as CrystalHD support was removed a few versions back. The ATV2 was great up until XBMC frodo when the hardware limitations started to show. I needed an alternative so I switched to Openelec on the Rapsberry Pi. Read More....

Apple TV 1 – CrystalBuntu – OpenELEC

John Large 49 Comments

It’s been a busy week. With the lack of ability to jailbreak the Apple TV 3 and the rising prices of the ATV2 due to it’s jailbreak friendliness I was torn between spending a lot of money on another Apple TV 2 or going down a different media centre route.

I’ve always used XBMC (now Kodi) since it’s birth, even before when it was Xbox Media Player & my family have become accustomed to how everything works. It works wonderfully for our needs & we now don’t have any subscription TV services (granted we download TV episodes but we have a TV license & could watch them for free on our set top box so hardly a crime). We also convert all our DVD’s into .mp4/.m4v/.mkv files so we can watch them without going to find the disk. Read More....

Raspberry PI – the perfect project machine?

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Anyone who knows me personally or follows my twitter/blog will realise I’m the eternal hardware geek. I love tinkering with stuff, hacking it to go beyond its manufacturers limitations and generally trying to squeeze every single use out of my hardware. I used to do loads of Xbox hacking on the original Xbox, experimenting with various chips and firmwares and generally making that underpowered box do much more than it should. From web servers to media players, fully fledged emulators to NAS I used my xboxs for everything. Then along came the Apple TV2. A £99 fully self contained box of joy. With a simple software mod (jailbreak) I was able to install XBMC on the atv2 and replace my 3 original xboxs from my home. These where fully reconditioned, chips removed & donated to charity as simple xboxs once again. Read More....

A Year Without Spending – Day 31-41 – Ten Days off from the blog, much to report.

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Well like I say, it’s been 10 whole days since my last post on here. I’ve had loads of stuff to do over the past few weeks which has included saving heavily for our Landrover (we got rid of our spanking new car at the beginning of the year in favour of getting a quality used car). This was for two reasons, firstly the new car thing just wasn’t us, whilst we had no trouble with it, and it was great to drive, it just didn’t suit us, and the depreciation was becoming sickening. Secondly, we are planning on travelling around Scotland this summer, and we need something a little more rugged than a VW, so the Land Rover it is. The not spending has allowed us to put a lot of money aside for the Land Rover and it will be great to buy it eventually (note at the start of this thing I Stated that we would buy a car this year, and it was exempt from the experiment). Read More....

Xbox Hacking – Xbox Crystal & Xbox Media Centre XBMC

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Latest Picture of my Xbox setup.

And a Macro of the xbox & Chip controller.

I started Xbox hacking back in October 2004. I bought a Crystal Xbox for £100. I wanted to get an older model due to the more complex chipping procedure of the 1.6 motherboards in new machines but after aloof thought I decided to go with the new crystal machine. I then purchased a Xecuter 2.6 Mod chip from Kaneaction who offered a great service. The mod chip fitting itself was a nightmare. Took me almost 4 hours to make all the solder points and rebuild the LPC . Also, I lost one of the copper tracks (the heat from the soldering iron destroyed the track) so I had to rebuild the track using wire. After the chip was installed i ripped out the original 8GB Western Digital HD and fitted a 250gb Samsung drive . I then booted the Xbox from Slayers Evox Boot disk and installed Evox, avalaunch & XBMC. Read More....