Slightly too much Kodi for fun#

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 22:02:24 +0000

I'd been vacillating for a while about buying a new monitor, but eventually I pulled the hammer (is that the idiom?) on a spangly new Dell S2721SQ, which arrived yesterday and provided the incentive to look at NixElec again. Because it (the monitor) has speakers, which means I have the hardware to fix the audio issues without having to commandeer the family TV.

Second rate

I don't claim to understand how ALSA works, and Kodi's approach to ALSA is even more weird, but I did eventually make it work for 44.1kHz sources: define an ALSA fixed-rate pcm for Kodi that is hardcoded to S16_LE format, and then tell Kodi about it in advancedsettings.xml

A sticky GUI mess

To the extent that Kodi can be configured through files, they're XML files. There is a toXML builtin in Nix, but it only generates a particular XML representation that would need XSLT to turn into files that Kodi likes - and XSLT for me is assigned firmly to into the same "tried it once, not going back to that" bucket as are m4 and Java applet programming.

What I really wanted is something that would let me write out (or generate!) a nested attrset describing the structure I want, and turn it, possibly via JSON, into XML. Python's dict2xml is very nearly it, but has no support for XML attributes, so I had to invent something slightly more complicated.

Sadly, the extent that Kodi can be configured through files is not the full extent. Although the sources are defined in XML, the content of each source (tv shows? movies? music?) seems to be set in a Sqlite database, which is another level of complexity to manage. So there's still manual twattery on the GUI to deal with.