Kodi: The holy grail of media streamer front-ends

Kodi, formerly called XBMC, is, to me at least, the holy grail of media streaming software. When I set out to build my media server the perfect streamer wasn’t available but I dreamt that one day something would come along that would change that. XBMC existed at the time but it was a bit rough around the edges and very much a niche offering but now I think it’s finally arrived.

Kodi will run on plenty of devices and after much searching I decided the Intel NUC was the perfect match for it. They’re small, compact and very quiet. They don’t generate much heat and use very little power. And they’re cheap!

There are plenty of NUCs available and it’s entirely your choice which one you choose and how much money you spend. I spent less than £200 for each unit, that’s with everything. So, this is what I went for:

Intel BOXDCCP847DYE: This has more than enough power for streaming uncompressed blu-ray rips.

C5 Cloverleaf Power Cord: For some reason known only to Intel this particular NUC doesn’t come with a power cable.

Crucial 4GB Memory: You can choose however much memory you like but I went for 4GB and have found it to be more than plenty.

Many people simply boot off a USB thumbdrive but for not a lot of money you can “do it properly” and install Kodi on a very fast Kingston 30GB mSATA Solid State Drive hard drive.

To control everything you need a remote. I use the GMYLE® Media Center Remote Control which is nice and cheap and works just fine. I did have to tweak a key to add the Context Menu and have shown how I did this.

There are plenty of YouTube videos available showing you how to build your NUC so I won’t do that here. I’ll just show you how to install Kodi and provide a few tweaks to get it working nicely.

I’ve got a Kodi client attached to each TV in my house and have configured things so that anyone can watch what they want on any TV by using a centralised database and media library.

Kodi can also be used to watch, pause, rewind and record Live TV. All you need is a decent tuner and TVHeadend.

Have fun!