Media centre and playback

Kodi

Kodi is a full ten-foot media centre application: a fullscreen, remote-friendly interface that organises your video and music libraries with artwork, metadata, and resume points, plays essentially every format in existence, handles music, photos, and PVR television with the right backends, and supports a vast add-on ecosystem. Point it at your film and music folders and it scrapes titles, posters, and descriptions into a browsable library that makes a SnipeOS machine a genuinely pleasant living-room device, which is a natural second life for exactly the older hardware this distribution keeps useful.

SnipeOS ships Kodi with one important piece of curation that beta users will remember earning. Kodi installs its own login session entries, and mid-beta installed systems came up with Kodi as the default greeter session, dropping first-time users into a fullscreen media centre instead of their desktop. The shipping product hides Kodi’s sessions from the SDDM greeter while keeping the application itself fully available from the Sound and Video menu, so the desktop is the desktop and Kodi is an app you launch, or, if you are deliberately building an HTPC, a mode you can re-enable knowingly. Its empty movie library first run is part of the validated gallery.

VLC

VLC is the universal media player, present on the installed system as the straightforward way to play a file right now. Its defining trait is that it plays everything, from every era, with its own built-in codecs: any video or audio file, DVDs, discs, network streams, and broken or partially downloaded files that other players reject. It converts and transcodes, streams to and from the network, applies audio and video filters, and does all of it through an interface that has been familiar for twenty years.

In the SnipeOS division of labour, VLC is playback and Kodi is the library. Double-clicking a video in PCManFM-Qt should just play it, and VLC is the correct tool for that job on any hardware tier. One first-run note documented in the success gallery: VLC asks once about its network metadata access policy (fetching cover art and media information), a privacy prompt worth reading and answering to taste on a distribution whose defaults lean private.