5 al­tern­at­ives to Kodi for a great home cinema

There are quite a few software solutions on the market with which you can organise your digital media and prime it for home playback. If you want to link up multiple devices, such as a tele­vi­sion with a PC or laptop, to build a personal home cinema, then you should ask yourself one question above all: What re­quire­ments do I have for my personal media center?

Users consume media in various ways. Some prefer to get a hold of the newest blu-rays, other prefer to stream their series and films online. If you fre­quently watch films in a group, then an LCD screen in your living room is a com­fort­able solution. If you fill your travel time with videos, then you would probably use a tablet or smart­phone more often. If the entire family wants to enjoy the full benefits of the available offers, then you need software solutions that allow access to multiple devices. Do you want to play your music through the entire apartment while showing your friends pictures from your vacation? This is also possible with the right media center.

The graphical ori­ent­a­tion of the TV screen is called the 10-foot user interface. Format and font size are designed to match the TV screen and be easily seen from 10 feet. All media centers that want to serve as al­tern­at­ives to Kodi offer this type of user interface.

Plex is a freemium media server and media client for various end devices. Those who know Kodi will probably also get along well with Plex, as the software is a fork of Kodi. One dif­fer­ence, though, is the back end. A server contains all media and provides access for linked devices. When you install Plex, you need an account and are required to set up a server. For this, it’s easiest to use a PC that’s always turned on and connected to the internet. This “home cinema PC” hosts all your videos, photos, and music files. You can add other devices by in­stalling the app and logging in with your account.

Watching tele­vi­sion obviously isn’t the only thing that a media center should be able to do. The program also helps you organise your music and add metadata. Me­dia­Portal allows you to create playlists, and re­cog­nizes existing playback lists. With the home cinema user interface for TV devices, you can easily scroll through your library from the comfort of your sofa. Listen to music from your computer or laptop via your HiFi system, stream the radio (internet radio as well), or watch DVDs and stored videos. Your photos can be run in a slideshow with back­ground music. The Ambilight plugin supports tele­vi­sions with its mood lighting function.

The Me­dia­Portal community con­trib­utes to the user ex­per­i­ence with plugins. For example, the voluntary pro­gram­ming provides skins with which you can in­di­vidu­ally customise the user interface. Simply download the ex­ten­sions from the official download page. Then you can modify the program with RSS feeds, messages, weather, or in­teg­rated videos as desired. The user-friend­li­ness of the 10-foot interface also has im­prove­ment potential. For example, bread­crumbs simplify nav­ig­a­tion.

The Emby Home Theater is an interface for your smart TV. Ideally, you should be about 10 feet away from your screen – for an optimal picture ex­per­i­ence as well as to protect your eyes. The media center can also be con­trolled by the tele­vi­sion or using voice control from Amazon’s Alexa.

While it’s of course possible to download MythTV as a package, most true Linux en­thu­si­asts would prefer to assemble the desired com­pon­ents according to their own spe­cific­a­tions. For this reason, MythTV has an available source packet as well as plugins for ad­di­tion­al services with which you can build your home cinema. Most Linux users swear by the operating system. It’s also well suited for media center solutions. If you don’t know about Linux yet, you can learn more about the open source operating system here.

MythTV also has a 10-foot user interface. You can com­fort­ably navigate through the ap­plic­a­tion using the TV remote or a keyboard on the large screen. You can watch, pause, or rewind current broad­casts. The software re­cog­nises com­mer­cial breaks, and you can skip over them if you wish. The recorder in­tel­li­gently records broad­casts on multiple channels, and supports analogue as well as digital TV sub­scrip­tions. MythWeb enables a detailed look at the user interface. This way, you can navigate more easily through the programme overview and organize your TV re­cord­ings.

As a Kodi al­tern­at­ive for Linux users, this is obviously not enough. The office website offers source code for building your own, though. You can include the add-ons yourself while building, or download a bundle from a third-party community provider. LinHES, for example, expands MythTV with its official plugins as well as Samba, NFS, and other daemons. The developer also released the Linux dis­tri­bu­tion Xubuntu with in­teg­rated MythTV. Mac and FreeBSD have also received packages for MythTV versions. Some Windows users have no other choice than to in­cor­por­ate the plugins them­selves.

The basic idea for MythTV came from Isaac Richards. In 2002, he struggled with a digital TV offer that was slow and riddled with com­mer­cials – as MythTV explains in its in­tro­duc­tion. He wanted more than a simple tele­vi­sion with a video recorder. He wanted to at least include a browser and in­ter­faces for games. He developed MythTV as open source software, and it has remained that way today. With the found­a­tion­al source code, the developer community built the cor­res­pond­ing plugins.

These are the official MythTV plugins:

• MythVideo: The player renders DVDs, helps video man­age­ment with metadata, and adds film posters (since Version 0.25 as the “video library” part of the source file)
• Myth­Archive: The plugin burns recorded movies and shows to DVD
• Myth­Net­vi­sion: This plugin in­teg­rates streaming services such as YouTube and Twitch in the MythTV interface
• Myth­Gal­lery: The gallery re­cog­nises all popular image files, organizes photos, and lets you create slideshows
• MythWeb: The browser interface enables media man­age­ment as well as TV recording on the PC
• Myth­Weath­er: The plugin for daily weather reports
• Myth­Browser: Surf the net via your tele­vi­sion with the light browser
• MythMusic: This module manages audio files on the server and serves as an audio player
• MythGame: Native computer games as well as emulators can be in­teg­rated into the MythTV interface with this plugin
• MythNews: The module ac­cu­mu­lates your sub­scribed RSS feeds and displays the posts
• Myth­Zone­mind­er: The plugin in­teg­rates the mon­it­or­ing tech­no­logy Zone­mind­er into MythTV, as long as the program is already installed on your PC

A jukebox from the fifties inspired the idea for the JRiver Media Center. In other words, the program, which was first released in 1998, used a jukebox structure similar to what is also used by iTunes. Up to version 8, the home cinema programme also ran under the name “JRiver Jukebox”. After the rebrand­ing, some updates only went out once there was another JRiver Jukebox – which was only the free audio-only version of JRiver MC 12. For the media center, you simply pay a fixed fee and then receive a lot of features and excellent video quality for all popular formats.