Mark's Expeditions in Technology and Life

I know that I promised an article on configuring a remote control in Kodi, but my laptop recently crashed. My laptop is where I test out my Linux instructions. So it will be a while. In the interim, here is an article I wrote back in 2014 about gaming on Linux. Enjoy! I absolutely love Linux. What is not to love. It is free, maintained by the community of users, secure, can run on old hardware and is fast! These same attributes also are its greatest weaknesses. For example, since it is maintained by the community, there are so many distributions (distros) to choose from. This can be confusing to a new user. Sometimes functions just do not work "out of the box" as advertised, and require some work in the Terminal, think Windows Command Line, to fix. Where Linux's attributes really let it shine and sometime let it down is in the world of gaming. I have managed to play several Windows games on Linux with some minor tweaking. Some games that no longer run on modern systems,...

In previous posts, we discussed the basics needed to get Kodi up and running from scratch. While Kodi works well out of the box, some tweaking is involved to use it to its fullest potential. One thing I really like about Kodi is that it is available in multiple languages. The interface and many of the official add-ons have been translated by the community into languages other than English. While displaying Kodi in your native language is great, the problem comes when you try to mix languages. This is especially evident when you try to mix languages that do not use the same style of alphabet such as English and Japanese. Kodi will display the non-Latin characters of the Japanese language as either boxes or gibberish. Since I live in a multi-language household, Thai and English, tweaking Kodi to display non-Latin characters, whether in media titles or subtitles, is a must. The reason why Kodi will not display languages such as English and Chinese together properly is due to fonts. Font...

Now that you have organized and renamed your files into something Kodi can readily read, it is time to add them to your library. With the release of the latest version of Kodi, Kodi 17 "Krypton", adding files to your library has become very user friendly. So let's get started. For all Media Previously, I stated that each media type needs their own folder. This makes it easier for you to add files to your Kodi library. For example, instead of having to tell Kodi where each of your movie files are, you only have to direct it to your "Movies" folder. Kodi will add every file in the folder to your "Movies" section of your library. Adding all types of media to Kodi follows the same process. I will go into depth for Movies and give a short synopsis for the other media types. Movies When you first start Kodi, you are presented with a screen saying that your Movie Library is empty. In order to add movies to your library, you need to tell Kodi where the...

So you have Kodi installed and customized it to look how you want. You may have even installed an add-on to two. All this is great, but how do you use Kodi to play back the media that you have on your computer? To do this, you need to add the media to Kodi's library. In this next series of posts, I will show you not only how to add media to your Kodi library, but ways to ensure that the media information displayed by Kodi is correct. Kodi adds media into its library by scanning for files in specified locations. Once it finds a file, it looks on the internet for more information. For example, you add the movie "Kirk and Spock's Excellent Tardis Journey" to Kodi. Kodi will scrape (download) the poster, a brief synopsis, and actor information from the internet. So Kodi can get the correct information, you need will need to prepare your files so they can be scanned properly. I will be breaking this preparation down into three parts: movies, TV shows, and music. The dire...