How To Install Kodi on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Kodi on Debian 9 Stretch. For those of you who didn’t know, Kodi (formerly XBMC Media Center) is an open-source and very powerful project that provides all the necessary tools for transforming your regular PC into a bona fide HTPC, which, if used in conjunction with a big-screen TV and a Hi-Fi audio system, will transform your living room into a veritable home theater. Currently, Kodi can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available. Use your media as-is: Kodi can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Kodi on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Kodi on Debian 9 Stretch

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Kodi on Debian 9 Stretch.

• Method 1. Install Kodi from PPA.

Install Kodi on Debian directly from Kodi’s PPA repository:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kodi

• Method 2. Install Kodi from the command line.

Run the following commands to install Kodi:

sudo apt install kodi

Now that Kodi is installed on your Debian system you can start it either from the command line by typing Kodi or by clicking on the Kodi icon (Activities -> Kodi).

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Kodi. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Kodi media center on Debian 9 (Stretch) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Kodi website.