Posts in "Python" category

This is the 2^nd article in my series about building and using binary Python modules in Kodi on Android. In the previous article I described prerequisites for building such modules. In this article I will cover building a simple Python/C extension module for Python in Kodi for Android. (...)

Important WARNING!

On recent Android 7 firmwares for some devices, including my Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1, the magic workaround that allows to load binary Python modules from Kodi addons no longer works. This means that currently there is no known way to import binary modules in Python addons on such devices. Because of this the following series of articles now has only historical value since there is a strong chance that you won't be able to use your compiled binary Python module(s).

This is the 1^st article in my series about building and using binary Python modules in Kodi on Android. In this article I will cover prerequisites needed to build a Python/C extension module for Python in Kodi for Android. (...)

This is an introduction to my series of articles that describe how to build binary Python modules for Kodi addons on Android platform.

Kodi mediacenter includes a full-featured (well, almost ) CPython interpreter for creating plugins. CPython, which is the reference Python implementation, in its turn provides the Python/C API that allows to create a binary Python extension modules in C language. These module are used, for example, to speed-up some CPU-intensive tasks, because Python, being an interpreted language, is relatively slow. (...)

Recently I discovered for myself the concurrent.futures Python module. It is the part of the standard library in Python 3 and for Python 2 it can be downloaded from PyPI. This module allows to run multiple time-consuming tasks in parallel in different threads or processes and then to collect the result of those tasks for future use. (...)

Quite a while ago I created a GUI micro-famework for Kodi mediacenter (formerly XBMC). At that time I tried to develop a subtitle addon for Addic7ed.com (which I did) and I needed to create a UI for the addon. Previously subtitle addons in Kodi had to have their own UI, so I used a several classes that Kodi-Python API provides and created a UI for my addon. Inspired with success (those were my first attempts to write something useful in Python) I decided to extend that UI to a micro-framework that would allow to create user interfaces for Kodi addon in pure Python without messing with XML skinning. I published my micro-framework on GitHub, submitted it to the Kodi official addon repository and created a topic on the Kodi official forum. I also used it in a couple of my personal projects, and that was all. (...)