Anyone care about Kodi any more?

I've been using the Kodi add-on for Giant Bomb on my Raspberry Pi 2 for the past couple of years and find it's a great way to watching on my TV from my couch - RPi does HDMI CEC so I can control via the TV remote. But there doesn't seem to be much love for the platform - the official add-on is ancient (says the author is "Whiskey Media" for starters), and not much is happening with the unofficial one (https://github.com/jimporter/giantbomb-kodi) which has been broken for anything higher than "high" quality video for some time now.

Now 1080p60 video is happening but I'm missing out. The RPi 2 should be capable (actually, I should download a video from the site to verify this) but obviously the add-on is the limitation here. YouTube's not an option for me (yet) - the garbage app on my Sony TV only does 720p30 max, and Kodi 18 apparently supports MPEG DASH (what YouTube uses for videos higher than 720p30) but it's not stable yet.

Does anyone care about this platform anymore? Anyone else use Kodi for watching GB videos? I see a lot of talk about Roku and Plex but are these officially supported? I'm not sure how Plex would fit into my environment, and I use the RPi/Kodi as my DVR so would be nice to not add another device to my TV (Roku or Chromecast or whatever).

And is there any way to watch a premium live stream outside of a web browser?

I'm in the same boat over here. I use Kodi exclusively for almost all my media stuff, on a Raspberry Pi 3. The unofficial plugin still works at 720p for me, but 1080p doesn't show as an option.

I've toyed with swapping to another device but would rather stay if possible. One solution I thought of would be to set up an automated download of the GB video RSS feed and set it to keep 30 days of content or something, but that's a whole lot of space I'd need.

Ok scratch that, I just found a super easy way of doing this. You just need to add the RSS feed into Kodi as a file source. For example, for the all premium videos HD feed it'd be the following format:

rss://username:password@www.giantbomb.com/videos/feed/hd/

Replace the username and password with your GB username and password. Works a treat and streams 1080p with no problems.

Enjoy! :)

Ok, even easier again... I just tried the Jimporter plugin on a fresh install of Kodi, and it plays 1080p streams without any problems. The only one that crashes is the "ten eighty pees" test stream. All the 1080p steams from the GBE crew work fine, and I'm currently watching the Linelight quick look from the West crew, which is also streaming at 1080. All fine. Whoop!

Which version of the add-on are you using? I was using 4.3.1 as that was the one marked as stable, but I've noticed there are two slightly newer versions...

EDIT: I just tried 5.0a2 there and it seems to be working with "HD" quality working now, and 1080p60 videos played OK during my brief testing. Will try and watch the rest of the latest UPF tomorrow and see how that goes.

Just wanted to throw my hat on the pile for people that watch GB on Kodi. Not sure which version of the add-on I'm using but it's been working since as lately as yesterday.

@manuel_garcia: 5.0a2 seems to be working OK for me, thanks!

@codicier: There's working, and there's working with 1080p60 streams. If you bring up the "codecinfo" overlay ("o" on a keyboard, varies with other controls), it will tell you the resolution, framerate and bitrate of the current video being played. If you go back to the main Add-on menu and select Giant Bomb it should tell you the author and version. If you never manually downloaded the add-on and just got it from the standard Kodi repositories, it's probably the old Whiskey Media version which doesn't work with "HD" quality streams (1080p60, as opposed to 720p60 for "high").

Latest version here seems to work OK: https://github.com/jimporter/giantbomb-kodi/releases/tag/v5.0a2

I watch with a 42" TV about 2.5m away, and the 1080p video is a significant step up in quality. Even for content which is not natively 1080p, the increase in bitrate should also help improve picture quality.

Thanks for clarifying the different versions. I'll see about getting the unofficial one. I've got a 50" TV and I'm interested to see how native 1080p looks.

Thanks! I can't wait to get home and try this version.

The jimporter and official addons both stop working for me if I try and log into premium and link the accounts; they just error out when trying to play a video. The addons both say that it logs into the account correctly, but then don't work AT ALL after. Does this have something to do with my GiantBomb account being logged in with google? I don't believe I've ever logged in with a regular username and password...

Anyone have a solution for this? Would REAAAALY like to lay in bed and use Kodi to watch the Duders.

Since last week I can't play any new videos any more. The last working one is the Super Mega Baseball 2 QL, since the every video fails to play. 5.0a2 (the 3.5.1 version from the repository stopped working ages ago, seems Kodi is abandoned?)

Edit: Looking at the bug reports for other Apps and the Desktop version it seems to be related to the missing HD links for all videos after the named QL.

Shucks; my main method of consuming Giant Bomb content is via Kodi and I too can't play any videos since the last few days. Anyone around to make a bug fix?

@sully: https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/why-are-the-hd-download-links-missing-1834762/?page=1#js-message-8840877

Seems like it should be fixed shortly.

Looks like they will be fixing it on the site side soon. In the meantime you can switch the quality setting in the Kodi addon from HD to High and videos will play.

As long as Kodi is being brought up, I've been updating the Kodi addon for my own use, as work on it seems to have gone quiet. It was using a depreciated API endpoint so I updated that. Switching from video_types to video_shows allowed for a lot more video series to be listed in the menu, and then I did some manual changes to how some of the video series are handled, as the way they are categorized in the API is a little haphazard and lacks cohesion. I also updated the podcasts and made the addon pull images for the video series when available to replace the default folder images. I used HawaiianYeti's fork as a starting point, so it has their changes to allow watching live shows using the addon.

I haven't put the changes up on github or anything because I don't actually know Python and have never done anything with it before- I looked the code over for a little bit to gain a very very basic understanding and went from there- so I'm sure my code is horrible and inefficient.

If anyone wants to look at it, I can toss it up somewhere, and if someone who actually knows Python wants to clean it up, even better.

@cadwr: Hey, do you mind sharing if your plugin is currently working? I'm actually trying to do the same, stumbling through the python scripts but using the compiled addon in Kodi just results in a crash (the plugin, not Kodi) for me.