Kodi was overkill for a phone-driven "play this video" box: a full media
center (web server, CEC, library DB) whose surface area is exactly what
wedged the Pi -- a video-decode session left Kodi stuck in an
uninterruptible firmware-mailbox call after a kernel keyring Oops, dead
until a power cycle.
mpv is just a video player: hardware-decoded straight on KMS/DRM, no
media-center baggage. It runs as its own --idle systemd service holding
the playlist, so playback keeps going even if the app/phone/WiFi drop --
the same autonomy Kodi's native playlist gave us. The app talks to it
over its JSON IPC Unix socket.
PlayerStateManager keeps the exact same public API, so the Flask routes,
templates, and UI are unchanged (only the engine underneath swaps out).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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