Yeah, but can it do that out-of-the-box with zero effort for the rest of my family? Sadly, no.

Futzing with Kodi updates, patches, updates to the OS, drivers, etc is all way too much to be considered ’smooth’ for most.

We've got a RPi running https://osmc.tv/ (based around Kodi) - other than pressing yes to install updates every so often it hasn't needed touching. There might even be an auto update at 1am type option.

It only gets used for local media + radio, twitch and youtube streams though - I don't know about other services.

Oh, yes, the old America's motto: "Give me convenience or give me death!"

Joking aside, there is not much futzing around to do if you just go with LibreElec, and you can even buy pre-installed boxes nowadays.

Does it support Full HD (at least) streaming from Netfilx and / or Prime?

My setup is like GP's, ie I play the videos on the computer, but what bothers me personally is that I have to boot windows to get the high quality streaming.

I've looked specifically at Kodi maybe a year ago and it didn't seem to support this. I'm OK with tinkering if I know it's actually possible to get this working.

The only service I subscribe to is njalla VPN, which I can then use to download any movie or TV show I want, in whatever quality I want and I get to keep it for as long as I want... can't get any smoother than that.

I'm not that big of a movie / tv show fan, I mostly watch while eating or when winding down for the day, so I rarely look for something specific. I'm very happy with Prime Video's offer, which is basically free for me, since I had already subscribed to Amazon Prime for regular shopping.

For my use, this is much less friction than any searching and waiting around for torrents or whatever to download.

There's also the discoverability factor. Not following current movies / shows, I don't necessarily know what shows exist. So browsing through random lists and then checking if they're available to download from enough people that it won't take a week is way too much work when all I want is to mindlessly watch something right now.

Kodi has add-ons (e.g Quasar or Elementum) that provide this ability to browse popular/new movie shows and lets you download a torrent and watch it as a stream. Your waiting time depends only on how many seeders are available, which means that popular files are basically instant.