As a media centre
Can we take it to the movies when we have to?
Batocera and Recalbox have Kodi built in, and it’s an option on the main menu. Kodi is an extremely comprehensive media centre solution, and once it’s set up, it’s designed for armchair use via a controller. The problem with Kodi is that it can be quite complicated to set up for things like playing media over the network or from streaming services. Expect to spend some time on the forums resolving issues.
In Recalbox, Kodi has some useful plugins for Netflix (who can afford that?–Ed), YouTube and Twitch installed, and you are prompted to enable these plugins when Kodi is first run. Setting them up is complicated, however, and it’s a shame that the UK keyboard type isn’t supported, although this can be worked around with some trial and error. Kodi is a fantastic piece of software, but don’t expect the simplicity of an Amazon Firestick or similar when adding new streaming services.
RetroPie can optionally install Kodi, and it’s necessary to enter the text-mode configuration menus to do this. It’s possible that, having done this, you may have to drop to the command line to do some manual setup work for things such as configuring a controller to work with it.
Lakka can directly load media files, such as MP4 videos, and it has a basic media player with the normal controls, such as scan forward/back. This falls short of the full media centre experience of a Kodi setup, but there is no configuration needed for the playback of single files and you never need to leave the main Lakka GUI. RetroArch installed on to a Linux distribution has the same facility.