I’m buying a libre computer (le potato) and using it to set up my first pi-hole. I’m very new to this kind of tinkering, so bare with me. I’m hoping to use just one le potato as both my pi-hole and a media center to run Kodi. Is this even possible for one, and two is Kodi what I should be using for pirating hard to access content? Without a VPN? Or is there a better solution available?
Possible, yes, totally. Delivering good performance? Depends a lot on usage and the SBC.
The chokepoint here would be the networking and RAM. Pi-hole isnt all that resource intensive but does use a bit of the network resources. Kodi, should run along with it but the performace as stated from other posters will leave a lot to be desired. The 2GB of RAM is not going to be powerful enough to do a lot. On the fly encoding for video is going to suffer by RAM, CPU and network output. Its possible to do it but youll definitely have to be patient with it.
By quickly looking at the specs it should work, assuming you will be using Linux. Performance should be fine since Pi-Hole isn’t intensive at all, and barely uses the network.
and two is Kodi what I should be using for pirating hard to access content?
It really depends on what you want. If you will be using a debrid service and streaming through that, then I would say yes, provided the debrid service has the ‘harder’ content cached. If they don’t, then you will have to switch to torrenting, and then playing the media from within Kodi, assuming you can find the correct torrents. A VPN would be required if there are laws forbidding the distribution of copyrighted material.
I appreciate the help, I’ll think on it a little more to decide if I should try to get a second SBC. Just from my little experience shopping for them, I can tell they’re tough to get for MSRP. So I don’t really want to deprive someone if I really don’t need it.
You’ll probably have to use containers or VMs if you want to be able to control Kodi via the HTTP API (eg. remote control apps or the web ui) while also being able to access the Pi-Hole web ui.
For pirating with Kodi I’d recommend looking into a Debrid service combined with an addon like Umbrella or Seren and a nice skin such as Arctic Horizon.
Depends of the computer, but Kodi uses quite a bit of ressources, depending on the content of course
Personal experience:
If you run a media center + a DNS prepare for slow DNS resolution.