I’ve been using and enjoying Kodi (and XBMC before that) since my old Popcorn Hour A100 media player went out the window. (It worked well but there were no software updates for it so it couldn’t support new media formats, especially Matroska.) There have been endless updates, improvements, additions and innovations since then.
I recently had a look at the bug tracker, just for fun (my IT career is ages behind me) and I was literally horrified. The amount of issues the Kodi developers have on their hands absolutely boggles the mind. Imagine how many media formats there are, how many different computer hardware platforms, how many operating system versions, how many graphics cards and TV screens… Now multiply all those numbers to arrive at the amount of possible combinations, and you might as well round the result to infinite. Yet the developers plow through all this, troubleshooting one problem after another. It’s a real job that takes real work, real time and can cause real frustration. Yet they do it, day after day, and they don’t get paid a cent for it.
A little while ago I posted in these forums about a problem I had with artist sorting in the music database. One dev picked it up, looked at it, reproduced the problem, corrected it, and submitted a pull request. All in one weekend. My problem is now solved in the most recent Omega update. I have never, and i mean NEVER, received any such service from the best, most reputable and most expensive commercial software vendors!
What compounds this is that this is a global team effort. Kodi devs are located all over the world, yet they work as a team. Having witnessed the disasters that can occur when multiple devs within one single company try to collaborate on a large project, I am beyond impressed by how well Team Kodi functions. I’ve been involved in a development project by a Swiss software company for a Dutch publishing company, and was terrible even with the luxury of having regular physical meetings, all development taking place on the same host system (an IBM mini running AIX) and a single IT manager responsible for keeping everyone on the right track. Let’s just say this project didn’t work out all that well. But what the Kodi devs are doing, and have been doing for years, is an infinitely bigger job, yet the do it infinitely better.
The Kodi devs are a bunch of unsung heroes. The MPAA believes that there are about 38 million Kodi users in the world (which seems as good an estimate as any) but how many of these users are aware of the sheer amount of effort and hard work that the devs have had to pour into it? Very few indeed.
So here’s to the Kodi developers! You guys rock. The Kodi user community can never thank you enough for all your efforts and hard work. But I’m giving it a try.
Thank you!!!