I have Kodi installed now, I will probably test OSMC later today, are there any other programs similar to them that I could test?

What I am mostly interested in:

  • fullscreen mode (dark mode / theme preferably, even if I would have to make it manually somehow)
  • option to navigate my drive or external drive
  • xbox controller support
  • subtitles support

What I want to accomplish is quite simple, every now and then I want to play a movie from my pc on my tv (connected via hdmi) and I don’t want to use mouse or keyboard while watching it to pause or turn the volume up a notch.

Kodi is kinda okay for all that but it feels a little wonky and pretty often makes a mess with my files, creating duplicates or ghost files on lists…

Thanks for any help!

    • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      Ah, sure.

      Yeah, I get it. I hope my post wasn’t unnecessarily overwhelming or anything. Didn’t mean to be all “come to the light, Kodi has all you need”. I see now what you were getting at. Not that Kodi is missing those features, but that you want something simpler with those features.

      I actually wanted something similar before I even bothered with Kodi. All I wanted was to maybe go through my files and play my videos with SMPlayer (I just prefer that over VLC).

      Too many features can be unnecessary, so I get you.

      Even for me, Kodi can sometimes be too much. My setup is so basic that it might as well be a glorified video player, but there are a few features I still use and the laptop isn’t for anything else, so no reason to use anything else at this point.

      Now, this might sound like an odd idea, but have you looked into maybe trying to launch a video player via Steam’s Big Picture mode? I ask because you can set up your controller to work similarly to mouse and keyboard with Steam Input and then you can control the video with your Xbox controller.

      You could probably make a custom layout and then map certain buttons to their respective keyboard shortcuts.

      You then wouldn’t need to install or set up anything else, and it’ll allow you to use whatever media player you want.

      I know this does add a bit more complexity for the initial starting up the player, but once everything’s mapped, you just launch it from Steam and watch your stuff (admittedly, you would need to open your files from within the media player, which could be annoying due to most standalone media players not really having their own “big picture” mode).

        • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          Ah, good ol’ Microsoft. Always finding ways to “surprise” us.

          I know you can use AutoHotKey to map controller input as well, but I totally understand why you might not want to after that other mess happened (and I imagine you may have actually tried this already anyway).

          Anyway, no prob. I’ll look around as well and if I come across anything, I’ll let you know.

          In the meantime, I hope your search goes well!

            • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
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              2 years ago

              Or maybe I just don’t remember?

              Lol, actually that’s on me. I was an idiot and confused AHK with Joy2Key for some reason.

              However, I did find this on the AHK wiki, although it seems like Microsoft, as usual, makes things harder than they need to be:

              For Xbox controller 2013 and newer (anything newer than the Xbox 360 controller), Joy1 to Joy32 hotkeys will only work if a window owned by the script is active, such as a message box, GUI, or the script’s main window. This limitation also applies to GetKeyState for Joy1 to Joy32 and JoyX, JoyY, JoyZ, JoyR, JoyU, JoyPOV (and possibly JoyV), but not for JoyName, JoyButtons, JoyAxes and JoyInfo. To detect those controller inputs for other active windows, use the XInput.ahk library.

              Still, it’s worth a shot regardless. Seems like it does support gamepads but there might also be some tinkering required.