blog/data/2023-08-10-kodi-invidious.txt

   1 Title: Invidious add-on for Kodi 20
   2 Tags: english, video, multimedia, kodi
   3 Date: 2023-08-10 19:50
   4
   5 <p>I still enjoy <a href="https://kodi.tv/">Kodi</a> and
   6 <a href="https://libreelec.tv/">LibreELEC</a> as my multimedia center
   7 at home.  Sadly two of the services I really would like to use from
   8 within Kodi are not easily available.  The most wanted add-on would be
   9 one making <a href="https://archive.org/">The Internet Archive</a>
  10 available, and it has
  11 <a href="https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:Internet_Archive">not been
  12 working</a> for many years.  The second most wanted add-on is one
  13 using <a href="https://invidious.io/">the Invidious privacy enhanced
  14 Youtube frontent</a>.  A plugin for this has been partly working, but
  15 not been kept up to date in the Kodi add-on repository, and its
  16 upstream seem to have given it up in April this year, when the git
  17 repository was closed.  A few days ago I got tired of this sad state
  18 of affairs and decided to
  19 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/kodi-invidious-plugin">have
  20 a go at improving the Invidious add-on</a>.  As
  21 <a href="https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872">Google has
  22 already attacked</a> the Invidious concept, so it need all the support
  23 if can get.  My small contribution here is to improve the service
  24 status on Kodi.</p>
  25
  26 <p>I added support to the Invidious add-on for automatically picking a
  27 working Invidious instance, instead of requiring the user to specify
  28 the URL to a specific instance after installation.  I also had a look
  29 at the set of patches floating around in the various forks on github,
  30 and decided to clean up at least some of the features I liked and
  31 integrate them into my new release branch.  Now the plugin can handle
  32 channel and short video items in search results.  Earlier it could
  33 only handle single video instances in the search response.  I also
  34 brushed up the set of metadata displayed a bit, but hope I can figure
  35 out how to get more relevant metadata displayed.</p>
  36
  37 <p>Because I only use Kodi 20 myself, I only test on version 20 and am
  38 only motivated to ensure version 20 is working.  Because of API changes
  39 between version 19 and 20, I suspect it will fail with earlier Kodi
  40 versions.</p>
  41
  42 <p>I already
  43 <a href="https://github.com/xbmc/repo-plugins/pull/4363">asked to have
  44 the add-on added</a> to the official Kodi 20 repository, and is
  45 waiting to heard back from the repo maintainers.</p>
  46
  47 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  48 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  49 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>