Remote streaming FROM LibreELEC to clients - do devs consider this?

    Hi, just subscribed to post this.

    I was searching through the net and have found almost noone mentions running LibreELEC on one machine and streaming input/display/sound from/to clients. Im doing this on Windows with Sunshine and find it very convenient. I imagine running a VM / Container with KODI on a VM server and being able to access it from any low-end device or SmartTV running Apollo/Moonlight. You could take your entire home library with you everywhere by the means of mobile running stream from your home. It requires a dedicated GPU but who knows if one day tech biggies would allow vGPU in home servers.

    Out of curiosity I have installed LibreELEC as a VM, took a LCD to my headless server to enable ssh and found it waste of time as there is no default option to install Sunshine. So im trying to build and add it to this VM.

    But Im not a developer or Linux Pro, just following CGPT advice. It seems it would be quicker if someone post if it's even possible.

    Thanks in advance!

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    Ah ok, thank you for a "cut to the chase" answer. I'm not intending to "pirate" anything.

    Honestly, can't see a difference between taking a raspi running LibreELEC to, say, a demo party with a thumbstick drive full of fresh seasons of pirated series attached. Can be hook'd it to a DLP and let bingewatch TwinkPeaks 5 the whole night with folks. You wouldn't consider ditching this nice project because of this, would you?

    BTW I'm not using KODI because each time I try to load my Library of ripped CD that I own or movies that went, or should have, open, it starts to freak me out with milliards of connections from some IP junkies hooked to a Studio network taking it for granted I have dload it from some dark darknet sources - hashes do not match - so I deserve disgrace and a hackaton.

    I will just turn a basic Debian desktop into mediacenter or stick with Windows desktop, no problem

    Don't know about 4K, but 720p / 1080p 60fps works fine over 100Mb/s LAN. Since Gigabit Ethernet is how a standard I can't agree with you. In each case you have to run cables and terminate them, the difference is, with LAN you have flexibility to connect literally anything while with splitter you're stuck to A/V

    • Best Answer
    Quote from tandpijn

    I imagine running a VM / Container with KODI on a VM server and being able to access it from any low-end device or SmartTV running Apollo/Moonlight.

    This can probably be done with a conventional Linux distro, but not LibreELEC, as we use a zero-copy display pipeline. This means media is decoded from file/stream and each frame is stored in RAM using a (buffer) format suitable for rendering/output; so each stage in the display pipeline (Kodi, ffmpeg, DRM compositing, etc.) simply passes a pointer to the buffer containing the data instead of copying the data (hence zero-copy). The side-effect of this is that there is no opportunity to 'grab' the frame (as it's a pointer to data, not actual data) for display, which is how everything from VNC to fancier video streaming server capabilities obtain the frames to stream. This is the status-quo for 'Generic' (using GBM) and all ARM SoC hardware that LE supports. Only the Generic-Legacy image (using Xorg) is different, but that image is likely to be EOL at some point in the not-distant future so wouldn't be worth the time/effort of integrating around. Running LE in a VM is possible but then responsibility for streaming frames passes to the host OS and no changes are needed in the LE guest OS. NB: LE is quite intentionally a 'dumb-client' distro and this is our niche in the Linux/Kodi ecosystem. There's no real interest from project staff to diverge from that.