Difficulty of getting Kodi + NAS up and running?

#1

Simple question: How difficult is it to get Kodi and a NAS server up an running using a Rock 5C and a Penta hat? I have seen numerous videos on how to do this with a Raspberry Pi 5, and the process seems fairly straightforward. (Basically flash, install a few things, and BOOM! done!)

I have lots of experience tinkering with Ubuntu (and even Gentoo, but that was back in the late 2000s) but I don’t have as much free time as I would like these days.

So, has anybody completed this sort of project recently? How much tinkering was necessary? Did you need to recompile the Linux kernel (while I would like to learn how to do this properly, I don’t think that I will have time unfortunately).

(Edit) How stable was the resulting setup?

Thank you for your help!

#2

You want to set up a Rock 5C as a server and a media player, right?

Setting up a server should be straightforward. It’s not different to any other Linux servers (I expect you want to set up some sort of RAID).

As for Kodi, the best option now is Joshua Riek’s Ubuntu but I’ve not been too successful in getting all the video acceleration to work (for example, HDR10). I think a better option is to use jellyfin, this would also give you access from other devices and video acceleration works out of the box.

#3

Thank you! I will look into Jellyfin further, it sounds like a great option!

I am guessing that Jellyfin works out of the box because developers have been developing for the Rockchip specifically? (A quick search and I found this: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/rockchip/) Or is Jellyfin the preferred option because it allows access from all other devices?

thanks again!

#4

Yes, the developers included rkmpp acceleration starting from version 10.9 (Rockchip platform for acceleration).

#5

Thank you! And my understanding after reading a great deal more is that Jellyfin acts as the server (and hardware decoder) but we can still use Kodi as the client (so that we can stream from Netflix for example, but still access our own movies via Jellyfin). Do I have this right?

You have been so helpful, thanks again!

1 Like
#6

I guess you can use Kodi as a Jellyfin client but I haven’t tried this myself. You can just view videos in a browser, like with Netflix (it should work with Chromium in this distro as it’s a special build).

No problem, hopefully your media center works out!