Installing Kodi On A Raspberry Pi 5

by Sam Hadow

I recently got a raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM and wanted to install Kodi on it. OSMC isn’t available for the Pi 5, and I didn’t want to use LibreELEC to still have a debian base and be able to run other scripts and services from the Pi. In this blog post I’ll show you how I did this installation.

steps

1. Preparing the base system

I decided to go with a minimal install of debian 13. In raspberry Pi imager it’s in the “Raspberry Pi OS (other)” category.

Unfortunately with the Pi 5, the configuration from the imager letting you configure a user and the SSH when flashing the micro SD card seems to be broken so I configured it manually after flashing the Pi 5 when booting it for the first time. It asks for the user creation and password and then I just enabled SSH with:

systemctl enable --now ssh

(the service is ssh and not sshd on the Pi, it’s not a typo)

2. installing the required packages

First we need to install kodi and some packages to have sound and a minimal GUI support.

sudo apt install kodi weston mesa-utils mesa-vulkan-drivers pipewire wireplumber pulseaudio-utils

3. running Kodi

3.1) I first created a dedicated user and added it to the required groups to run Kodi as a systemd service:

sudo useradd -m kodi
sudo usermod -aG video,audio,input,render kodi

3.2) Then I enabled autologin for kodi on TTY1

sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d

and in this folder I created this file:

#/etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/autologin.conf
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --autologin kodi --noclear %I $TERM

3.3) Then I enabled lingering for Kodi (which is needed to start user systemd services even without a shell session)

sudo loginctl enable-linger kodi

3.4) Finally I created and enabled the service to start Kodi on boot:

First creating the folder:

sudo mkdir -p /home/kodi/.config/systemd/user

And then a service unit file:

#/home/kodi/.config/systemd/user/kodi.service
[Unit]
Description=Kodi Media Center (DRM/GBM)
After=systemd-user-sessions.service
Wants=systemd-user-sessions.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kodi \
  --standalone \
  --drm \
  --tty=/dev/tty1

Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=3

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

After this making sure the ownership is correct:

sudo chown -R kodi:kodi /home/kodi

And then to enable the service:

sudo systemctl --user --machine=kodi@.host daemon-reload
sudo systemctl --user --machine=kodi@.host enable kodi

And Finally:

sudo reboot

4. checking logs

To check Kodi related logs, we can use the following command:

sudo journalctl _UID=$(id -u kodi)

It’ll show all the journalctl logs from the kodi user.