0Tips for new Kodi users

I’ve recently star­ted the migra­tion from 7MC to Kodi now that Media Cen­ter is no longer sup­por­ted, and con­sequently many plu­gins for it are no longer being act­ively developed.

I opted to use the Aeon Nox theme as it seems to be widely used, extens­ively cus­tom­is­able, and fre­quently updated. Dif­fer­ent themes seem to require totally dif­fer­ent settings

1. To enable a guide longer than 3 days, first “advanced set­tings” need to be enabled. I found this easi­er to do with the default theme, as I could­n’t find the option in Aeon Nox

2. Aeon Nox set­tings don’t seem to clone between machines when using the “backup” plu­gin. I found copy­ing 2 folders allowed me to duplic­ate my theme set­tings between PCs. script.skin.helper.service and skin.aeon.nox.5 in %appdata%\kodi\userdata\addon_data

3. To increase the font size of RSS edit Font.xml in %appdata%\Kodi\addons\skin.aeon.nox.5\1080i and cre­ate a new font 13b which i the same as font 13 but with a lar­ger size. Then edit Includes_Widgets.xml and change the font used for rss to the new font13b. The value for “top” will also need edit­ing so that the RSS text isn’t pushed off the bot­tom of the screen.

4. When back­ing-up Kodi with the back-up plu­gin I have found that addons don’t get enabled. I manu­ally enabled 1 addon, quit kodi, and then looked in %appdata%\kodi\userdata\database. I then over­wrote addons27.db with the one i wanted to restore and all my addons were restored.

5. Cre­ate a playercorefactory.xml so that videos play with MPC-HC (and there­fore with LAV and Mad-VR).

<playercorefactory>
 <players>
   <player name="MPC-HC" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
     <filename>C:\Program Files\MPC-HC\mpc-hc64.exe</filename>
     <args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
     <hidexbmc>false</hidexbmc>
     <hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
     <warpcursor>none</warpcursor>
     <playcountminimumtime>540</playcountminimumtime>
   </player>
   <player name="DVDPlayer" audio="true" video="true"></player>
 </players>
 <rules action="prepend">
   <rule filetypes="mkv|avi|divx|ogm|mp4|mov|m4v|flv|m2v|mpeg|mpg|mts|m2ts|vob|bdmv|iso" player="MPC-HC">
      <rule protocols="http|https" player="MPC-HC"></rule>
      <rule protocols="daap|rtv|rtsp|rtmp|rtmpe|rtsp|mms|rtp|pvr" player="DVDPlayer"></rule>
   </rule>
 </rules>
</playercorefactory>

5. To use your Kodi like a chromecast (i.e. so you can cast videos to it from your phone or laptop) have a look at this art­icle on HowToGeek

6. To slightly delay Kodi (assum­ing you’re run­ning it on star­tup) so that it keeps win­dow focus and the net­work­ing has time to con­nect, change the prop­er­ties of the short­cut and add “-d 5” at the end of the path to the kodi exe. Thanks to Joe D for this tip