Kodi Web Interface - Chorus2

The default Web Interface for Kodi.

A great modern Web UI for Kodi. Browse your Music, Movies or TV Shows from the comfort of your own web browser. You can play media via Kodi or stream it in your browser. Works best with Chrome but plays well with most modern browsers.

Successor to Chorus. A complete rebuild using Coffee Script, Backbone, Marionette and much, much more.

Author

Jeremy Graham with help from these kind people

Current state

Pretty good, most things work really well. Other things need polish/finishing/fixing. Still considered beta software, expect bugs, changes, nuclear war, etc.

Getting it working

As of Kodi v17, Chorus2 comes pre-installed out of the box, you just need to enable it and tick a few boxes.

Enabling & Configuring

Kodi > Settings (cog) > Services > Control

Enable "Allow control of Kodi via HTTP"
Select Web interface
Select "Kodi web interface - Chorus2"
Enable "Allow programs on this system to control Kodi"
Enable "Allow programs on other systems to control Kodi"

For security reasons you should set a username and password to prevent unauthorised access

Manual install

For Kodi v16 and below or if you want to get the latest version ASAP, an install via zip is the easiest way to go. Grab the latest release of webinterface.default.2.X.X.zip from the releases page then install it like this. NOTE: Chorus2 is intended to be used with the latest version of Kodi and some (or all) things might not work in older versions due to API changes.

Using it

Point your web browser to http://localhost:8080 - replace localhost with your IP address if using remotely and if you have changed your port to something other than 8080 be sure to change that too. More information and advanced usage can be found over on the Kodi Wiki page.

Feature requests / Bugs

Add them to the list. For bugs please include Kodi version, Web browser version, Chorus version and any errors that display in the console. For feature requests, checkout the API browser to see if your request is currently possible.

Streaming

Disclaimer: The success of this depends on the file formats vs what the browser supports. In general most things work.

Audio streaming

In the top right there are some tabs, two of them are named Kodi and Local, this is how you toggle what player the UI is controlling. In Local mode the logo and accents are pinky-red, In Kodi mode the logo is the Kodi blue. When you are in a given mode, actions affect that player, so if you click Play on a track when in Local mode, it will play through the browser, likewise, when in Kodi mode all commands are sent to Kodi. You can also add media to other playlists by clicking the menu buttons (three dots vertical) on most media items.

Video streaming

Video streaming via HTML5 "sort of" works, it really depends on the codec used. An embedded VLC player is also available with better codec support. This looks like the best we can get until Kodi supports transcoding. Chrome users: Chrome has removed support for vlc/divx plugins so streaming a video requires a Chrome friendly codec. For best results use Chrome with mp4 video that has 2 channel audio (5.1 audio doesn't seem to work).

Kodi settings via the web interface

You can change most of the settings you would find in Kodi via the settings page in the web interface. Some settings have been omitted as they require interaction with the GUI and others are just a basic text field with no options.

Kodi API browser

There is a hidden feature in Chorus that allows you to play with the Kodi API and see what is capable via the JSON-RPC interface. If you are building an app or addon that uses the API this can be super useful for both finding and testing all the methods and types available. If you are thinking about a new feature for Chorus, this is also a great place to test if it is possible (and fast track development by adding a working example to an issue). You can find the API browser via "Chorus Lab" (bottom right 3 vertical dots > "The Lab") or directly via http://localhost:8080/#lab/api-browser.

Contributing

If you would like to make this project better I would appreciate any help. There is a develop branch for each version of Kodi. Please do pull requests against the dev branch for the correct version (even better if you can do a PR for both). Leia (v18) dev branch is 18.x-dev, Krypton (v17) dev branch is 17.x-dev. See the developers documentation for information about getting a dev environment up and running then compiling the project using docker.

Translations

I only know English so definitely need help with this. I also don't know heaps about javascript multilingual stuff but thanks to @mizaki we have a structure ready to go. So it should be nice and easy to translate the UI.

At the moment, there are a handful of languages available but more can be easily added. More strings are always being added so always consider english as the source of truth.

So if you see something in english but want it in your language, I need you! To contribute, send me a PR on a new branch against 18.x-dev and/or 17.x-dev, or if you don't know git, a link to the language file.

Language Files here. English is the only real complete translation file so start with that as your base.

Donate

Are you a fan of Chorus? You can buy Jeremy a beer to say thanks :)

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.