How to use Kodi to watch live TV

Kodi is a powerful home media tool available on a wide range of devices. With the right hardware and matching plugins, adding your over the air TV channels to the main Kodi interface is a breeze.

Products used in this guide

Amazon: HDHomeRun Connect Duo ($100)
Microsoft: Kodi for Windows 10 (Free)

For the purposes of this guide, we're using a HDHomeRun Connect Duo tuner, but the process is the same for other supported hardware. You also must have set up your hardware first before going into Kodi.

Kodi has add-ons for HDHomeRun and other similar hardware, but those run like dedicated apps. What we're doing here is integrating the live TV channels directly into Kodi's interface for ease of use.

How to enable live TV on Kodi

Click on add-ons in the Kodi sidebar.
Hover over my add-ons in sidebar.
Select PVR clients.
From the list, select the relevant PVR client for your hardware.
Click install.

That's all you need to do to enable live TV within Kodi. It's a simple, seamless setup, and now you just have to go back to the main screen and click on the TV menu item in the sidebar.

How to watch live TV on Kodi

All of your channels have been pulled into Kodi's main interface, and it's pretty damn slick. When you first go into your TV section in Kodi, it'll pop up a list of channels on the left of the screen with currently playing shows. To see more channels you just scroll.

There's also a neat TV guide for viewing everything that's on now and upcoming across your entire channel list. And whenever you're watching something live, flicking out to the full guide or even just the upcoming guide for that channel never gets rid of what you're watching. It always fades into the background.

As you watch, recent channels and favorites will begin to populate within the TV section for quicker access. The beauty of this setup is that any device you install Kodi on can integrate live TV in just a few steps using your local network. There's no additional antenna required.