Is there a way to legally watch films via Kodi?

[Roy]

I no longer own a DVD player or Blu Ray, so outside of Sky/Netflix have no way to purchase films and watch them whenever I want.

Is there any medium for buying an electronic copy of a film for storage on your own network, essentially I'd like to buy the film but own it digitally... I suspect the answer is no as I've not heard of anything like this...

[alsemail]

Nothing to stop you ripping and storing it yourself using a PC bluray drive which is only ~£50

Otherwise you'd have to forget about Kodi and buy an AppleTV4 and use iTunes.

The problem with any of the digital downloads is they're inferior to the Bluray/UHD in terms of video and audio. That may or may not be an issue for you.

[Roy]

I suspected as much, I'm happy to buy but I'd imagine the copy protection to make my own backups would be a pain, I'll have to do a bit of research

[Lee Brown]

Originally Posted by Roy

I suspected as much, I'm happy to buy but I'd imagine the copy protection to make my own backups would be a pain, I'll have to do a bit of research

I used makemkv to rip the (limited) number of BluRays I own for playback on Kodi. I didn't have any trouble with copy protection, and it's free while still in Beta.

[alsemail]

Yup. I've been using it for a few years.

[AdamBrunt]

Originally Posted by alsemail

Nothing to stop you ripping and storing it yourself using a PC bluray drive which is only ~£50

Otherwise you'd have to forget about Kodi and buy an AppleTV4 and use iTunes.

The problem with any of the digital downloads is they're inferior to the Bluray/UHD in terms of video and audio. That may or may not be an issue for you.

Unless you have (a) a very good LAN setup eg fully wired gigabit network (b) good quality hardware for the KODI device and (c) high spec TV then IMHO you won't notice much difference in the quality, if ripping to say 1080p, with the Blu-ray original.

Of course there is nothing, technically, stopping you ripping an exact copy as long as you have the storage space. A 1080p X264 AC3 rip is , on average, about 3-4GB compared to 16-20GB exact copy.

[shteve]

I just installed the latest Alpha of Kodi Leia. It now supports DRM. I already had the Amazon Prime addon installed but it didn't work for me with Kodi Jarvis. The addon just asked me to login to Prime, and then downloaded/installed Widevine (the Windows DRM solution) when I tried to play something. Then everything just worked. Mucho impressed. Seems there's a Netflix addon too, though I don't have an account to test that.

[KeyserSoze]

Thats good to know. My 1st gen Amazon Fire Stick has been running like arse for a while now.

Interested in to know how the authentication works though. Wouldn't want my Amazon account details compromised.

[dataloss]

Originally Posted by alsemail

Nothing to stop you ripping and storing it yourself using a PC bluray drive which is only ~£50

Otherwise you'd have to forget about Kodi and buy an AppleTV4 and use iTunes.

The problem with any of the digital downloads is they're inferior to the Bluray/UHD in terms of video and audio. That may or may not be an issue for you.

Just a note that iTunes files are DRM wrapped MP4s so you can unDRM them without loosing any quality.