Let's be honest -- in a world with easy legal streaming thanks to inexpensive services like Netflix and Hulu, Kodi media center is probably used mostly by pirates. It is not likely the average consumer is storing video and music files locally to play on their TV -- it simply isn't worth the hassle these days. With that said, not all Kodi users are thieves -- I am sure some are legally buying media for playback on the media software... maybe...

Regardless of why you use Kodi (I'm not judging), the best way to experience it is through a Linux distribution that focuses on it. LibreELEC, for instance, is a lightweight distro that exists only to run the Kodi media center. It is quite popular with Raspberry Pi owners, but it runs on other hardware too, including x86_64 and WeTek boxes. Kodi 18 "Leia" recently achieved Beta 1 status, and as a result, LibreELEC 9.0 Alpha has been updated with it. In other words, the most bleeding edge LibreELEC now runs the most bleeding edge Kodi.

• 5 cool music player apps

  Do you like music? Then Fedora may have just what you’re looking for. This article introduces different music player apps that run on Fedora. You’re covered whether you have an extensive music library, a small one, or none at all. Here are four graphical application and one terminal-based music player that will have you jamming.

• youtube-viewer – alternative way to interact with YouTube

  There are tons of really useful command-line multimedia utilities available for Linux (and other platforms). cmus, youtube-dl, castero are to name just three essential command-line multimedia apps that frequent my shell.

  If you’re looking for another way to watch YouTube videos, you should also check out youtube-viewer. It’s billed as a semi-automatic tool for browsing YouTube. It has lots of advanced options, including search-based filtering on various criteria and support for selecting videos matched by a regular expression.

  The software offers both a command-line interface to YouTube as well as a graphical interface. The software is written in the Perl programming language. For GTK YouTube Viewer my system was missing File::ShareDir. Installing the perl-file-share package fixed the problem.

• Nova is an open-source video player for phones, tablets, and Android TV

  inding the perfect media player on the platform you like to enjoy watching or listening to content on can be a pain in the butt. I remember this being such a hassle on the desktop PC until VLC came around, and now most of the people in the know either use it or MPC-HC. Then people began watching more content on their smartphones, and again, it led to a huge search for the go-to application to use. For a long time, this ended up being an application called MX Player, which has been downloaded by over 500,000 million users. As people have begun to move away from MX Player, a new open-source video player has emerged and it is being called Nova.

  So you may wonder if MX Player had such a strong following then why are so many people looking for alternatives? We see this from time to time though. An application gets so big that some feel it becomes bloated with features, and some feel the updates aren’t pushed out fast enough, or a recent user update has tarnished the experience. However, in the case of Android’s most popular media player, it was actually when MX Player was all of a sudden acquired by a media giant in India. This started to worry people because once a popular application gets acquired, the parent company almost always ruins what made it so great.

Free/libre video editors like Kdenlive, plus tools like Natron compositor and Jubler subtitle editor are now available in AppImage format. This including OpenShot, Shotcut, VidCutter, Avidemux. You can make executable and simply double-click to run these programs in any GNU/Linux distro. These applications in AppImage format are simple like EXE (Windows) and DMG (macOS) to download, store, and run. Plus, AppImage format is "portable" in sense you don't need to install it. Download them below and run your favorite even in LiveCD session.

Recently, when my son asked me to digitally convert some old DVDs of his high school basketball games, I immediately knew I would use Handbrake. It is an open source package that has all the tools necessary to easily convert video into formats that can be played on MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and other platforms.

Handbrake is open source and distributable under the GPLv2 license. It's easy to install on MacOS, Windows, and Linux, including both Fedora and Ubuntu. In Linux, once it's installed, it can be launched from the command line with $ handbrake or selected from the graphical user interface. (In my case, that is GNOME 3.)