Introduction
The WDTV SMP has been a faithful and wonderful Media Streamer and a playback unit for your acquired video files. Unfortunately age is catching up with it and newer and more sophisticated file formats no longer play, the ritual of manually updating metadata is proving a chore, and everyone is talking about this new open source software called Kodi!
Kodi is an open source program developed by a huge team of volunteer developers. Kodi can be installed on a range of devices running Windows, Android, Linux and more. The major developer of the Android strain of Kodi has quit the team to go out and develop his own version of Kodi, but written especially for Android TV Devices, and in particular the Nvidia Shield. He calls his version SPMC.
It is possible to install Kodi Krypton and SPMC on the same android device and have them run independently of each other.
The 'official' Kodi.tv website is here: http://kodi.tv/
In its initial form Kodi/SPMC is totally and completely legal to install and operate. It comes with numerous Kodi approved addons which do a variety of things. Being 'open source' developers have been able to write unapproved 3rd party addons which access a variety of resources from less than legal websites.
These addons enable watchers to enjoy the latest TV Episodes, TV Series and Movies. Thus lies the great delight that the majority of users use Kodi/SPMC to access
Kodi/SPMC is predominantly designed as a streamer, it streams online material via the internet to your device and onto your TV screen. A TV show delivered in the UK on a Monday night can be streamed around 30 minutes or so after airing to anywhere in the world via the internet.
The latest block buster can be seen the same way. Once released as a DVD or BluRay disk, a movie can be ripped illegally, uploaded onto the internet and be accessed via a Kodi/SPMC addon almost immediately.
Or you can decide to use Kodi/SPMC as a media player, similar to the way you used your WDTV.. A movie or TV episode file can be uploaded onto the internet and then downloaded to a user's home and played back via Kodi/SPMC.
Being open sourced, Kodi/SPMC plays all the file types quickly, easily and perfectly!
Kodi/SPMC can create a library of your files by scraping metadata from websites such as The TV Database, The Movie Database and IMDB and provide a synopsis of each episode or movie as well as news on actors, IMDB scores. It is truly an amazing piece of software!
So you reckon you might give this Kodi a try? For a Windows PC, you will install Kodi. For an Android device you could choose Kodi or SPMC.
I would recommend that you install Kodi on your laptop, set up how you want with just a few addons and try it out. You can then decide if Kodi is what you want to go further with and probably spend money on Android TV Box or the like.
You can easily use an HDMI lead to connect your laptop to your TV and be able to view Kodi on the big screen.
There are numerous YouTube videos available across the internet which will show every little step required. At first it may appear daunting, but with a little perseverance it could become the major source of entertainment for your home.
You can get Kodi from here. Just select the version and platform you want, download and then install it. Go to HERE where there will be some help for you on some basic 'Setting Up".
