Streams: where to find them, how to play & record them

[audioresearch]

I've been using an Amazon Fire Stick with Kodi to watch streaming video, but I would like to better understand what is going on under the hood.

Am I correct that the addons that run under Kodi are not the sources of the streaming video but merely provide a front-end to easily play video streaming sources provided by others? In other words, the Kodi addons are just layered on top of streaming sources that are usually independent of those addons?

I have found certain "playlists" that I was able to load into the VLC player I run on my pc and I have had intermittent success in playing streams using VLC. It appears that when I do that, VLC is going directly to those sources just as the addons under Kodi do - am I correct in that assumption?

Where are the best places to find lists of streaming sources that cover most of them and whose sources usually work?

Is watching sources with a playlist loaded into VLC on a pc the most straightforward way of watching streams (without having to layer on all sorts of bloated things like front-ends)?

What are the best free ways to record or otherwise copy/capture streams at this time (I would love to find a way to copy the actual files on the servers that get played out to a stream rather than recording the stream in real time if there is a way to do that. That would let me avoid recording in real time freezeups and other glitches that happen when streaming over the Net.

What are the best direct free sources of streams and/or downloadable playable video files in general (I've noticed names like "vodlocker", etc, shown as sources when I have played streams using Kodi and I wonder if there are a set of these sources that are preferred to use to get good quality, comprehensive collections of video and what those might be?

Thanks for any help and feel free to recommend better or simpler ways to do what I want if anything I said is not the best way to do something.

[usually_quiet]

I've been using an Amazon Fire Stick with Kodi to watch streaming video, but I would like to better understand what is going on under the hood.

Am I correct that the addons that run under Kodi are not the sources of the streaming video but merely provide a front-end to easily play video streaming sources provided by others? In other words, the Kodi addons are just layered on top of streaming sources that are usually independent of those addons?

I have found certain "playlists" that I was able to load into the VLC player I run on my pc and I have had intermittent success in playing streams using VLC. It appears that when I do that, VLC is going directly to those sources just as the addons under Kodi do - am I correct in that assumption?

Where are the best places to find lists of streaming sources that cover most of them and whose sources usually work?

Is watching sources with a playlist loaded into VLC on a pc the most straightforward way of watching streams (without having to layer on all sorts of bloated things like front-ends)?

What are the best free ways to record or otherwise copy/capture streams at this time (I would love to find a way to copy the actual files on the servers that get played out to a stream rather than recording the stream in real time if there is a way to do that. That would let me avoid recording in real time freezeups and other glitches that happen when streaming over the Net.

What are the best direct free sources of streams and/or downloadable playable video files in general (I've noticed names like "vodlocker", etc, shown as sources when I have played streams using Kodi and I wonder if there are a set of these sources that are preferred to use to get good quality, comprehensive collections of video and what those might be?

Thanks for any help and feel free to recommend better or simpler ways to do what I want if anything I said is not the best way to do something.

The Kodi addons which find free movies and TV shows link to warez. Discussions regarding such apps are prohibited at VideoHelp and Kodi's developers don't recommend or support them either. You should look elsewhere for help.

[redwudz]

audioresearch, asking about warez on our site can get you banned. Please read our rules before posting.

Thread closed.

Moderator redwudz