Having pivoted from the finance world to the tech world, Udemy has been instrumental in helping me acquire some much-needed skills in my line of work. I am not a ninja developer but I can fix bugs and create simple plugins for my sites. Again I have mostly Udemy to thank for that. I do however have one big problem with the platform. There is no official way to watch their training videos on your site on your TV.
I am a big believer in not pirating and whenever I can I do support other people’s hustles. So downloading torrents of Udemy videos was not an option for me. Besides, these torrents do come as one big monolithic file and if the instructor of the course you want to download updates his course from say VueJS2 to VueJS3 you will have to re-download the entire course again if you are using torrents.
Casting Udemy videos doesn’t work
Casting to a TV using the official app doesn’t work either. Only the intro video on courses work when you cast. Once you get to the paid portion of each course you get an error in Chromecast. When I reached to Udemy Customer Support, they claimed that they only support the official Chromecast device. This doesn’t make sense given the fact that my Mi Box S does have an official Chromecast Ultra built-in.
I suspect that Udemy is using some form of DRM tool that is not compatible with Chromecast for some reason. I really needed to watch their videos on a big screen and my first solution was to use JioPages the browser on my Mi Box but the experience is less than ideal. For some reason, the videos would turn green once in a while and probably because of decoding issues the box would get hot fast.
Kodi to the rescue
Most people tend to associate Kodi addons with piracy but that has never been Kodi’s fault. It’s like blaming PC makers for software piracy. Kodi is an extensible video player that can take piracy as well as bonafide plugins. Thankfully someone out there has made a useful Udemy Kodi addon. This add-on allows you to watch Udemy videos using Kodi. This is not a piracy plugin. You need a working Udemy account and you will only be able to view videos of courses you have enrolled in.
Matt Huisman aka SlyGuy is a Kodi plugins maker who has made several plugins that would be of interest to Zimbabweans and anyone living in Southern Africa. He has made
- A ShowMax kodi addon. Yes you can watch ShowMax on Kodi
- You can watch DStv Now on Kodi too because there is an addon for that
He focuses on non-piracy plugins and these and the Udemy plugins are just a few of the plugins he makes. To install the Udemy plugin in Kodi you first need to enable installing addons from Unknown sources. You will get a warning about this but don’t worry these are safe community reviewed open source addons.
Once you have enabled Unkown sources follow these steps to install SlyGuy’s repository to Kodi:
- Select “Add source”.
- Select “<None>” and type in exactly https://k.slyguy.xyz
- Select “OK”.
- Go back to System menu
- Select Add-ons
- Select “Install from zip file”
- Select “SlyGuy” in the list.
- Finally select the “repository.slyguy.zip” file
- Once this is installed it means you now have the SlyGuy repo installed on your Kodi
- Go back to Install and select install from repository
- Select SlyGuy repository
- Select Video addons
- Scroll down to Udemy and install it
Now you have the addon installed. To use it go to videos and select Video addons. If this is your first time you will be asked to log in. When you do you will have to go to my courses and select the course you want. You will note that courses are arranged like folders. Go into a specific folder to play the video of the topic you want. You will be asked to select your desired bitrate. When you press OK the video you want will start playing.
That’s it. You can now watch Udemy videos on your TV. Of course, you will need a device that supports Kodi to do this. This might be your Android TV or you will have to use a TV box. Also, this will only work on a certified device that comes with Level 1 Widevine support. It will not work on those Chinese TV boxes that are peddled on Aliexpress and Facebook
