[Fire TV General] dbdoshi:
Hello, I was playing with Kodi over the weekend to run it from my Western Digital MyCloud (WD). I had initially moved my Thumbnails folders to WD and was using advancedsettings.xml to redirect the thumbnails folders to WD.

Recently I ran into a way to move the whole Kodi folder to WD (or any network storage). If this has been mentioned before, my apologies for the redundant post. Anyways...

For background, when you start Kodi, the app reads a file (if present) to find where its files are located. If this file is not present, Kodi uses the default location to find its files. Through this file, you can redirect your Kodi to look at alternate location to run. The name of the file is "xbmc_env.properties" and it has a single line listing your desired location. I have attached it to this post. More info here:

http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Change settings folder for Android

The steps to make this happen are:

-- Create your network share on WD. I went with a public share and using CIFS to access the share.

Say, my share is "\\192.168.1.2\MyKodi"

-- Create a mount on FTV to that share. For mounting help, see http://xdaforums.com/fire-tv/help/run-script-firetv-boot-t2986158

Say, my mount is "/mnt/obb/KodiShare"

-- Make sure you can read/write to this mount by testing it with an app like ES File Explorer.

-- Now, you will need to start with a clean install of Kodi.

-- Do not install any addons or do any restores of your Kodi backup at this point.

-- Once Kodi is installed, open it once so that your folders are created for you. Then shut down Kodi.

-- Create a file named "xbmc_env.properties" and put it in /sdcard. The file has to be named exactly that and it has to be located at /sdcard.

-- Now, open Kodi. Let it stay up for a min or so. In the background, Kodi will make a ".kodi" folder in your mount and will create a skeleton structure of all folders/files. Basically, you will see "/mnt/obb/KodiShare/.kodi"

-- CAUTION: If you are starting with a fully customized Kodi with your addons, Kodi WILL NOT MOVE your addons/etc. during the previous step!

You will need to do that manually.... (move the userdata and addons folder manually from /sdcard as if you are restoring a backup)

-- The folder ".kodi" on your mount will have identical structure as is for a default install. You can verify it by drilling down into your mount.

-- Now shut down Kodi.

-- At this point, you will have 2 ".kodi" folders. One will be in your mount and the other at /sdcard/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.

-- You are now ready to restore your backup (if you have one). If you do not have any backups, you can skip this step.

You will copy your "userdata" and "addons" folder to /mnt/obb/KodiShare/.kodi.

You will be over-writing those 2 existing folders already present there.

-- Now, go to "/sdcard/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi". Delete everything in the ".kodi" folder, all 6 subfolders. (this is where the space savings are realized)

You can delete all this because the data within ".kodi" has been moved to your mount (or WD).

Keep the empty ".kodi" folder though.

-- Start Kodi. You should see it functioning normally.

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So, what happens if you shut down FTV, restart your FTV but your share is not mounted correctly and you start Kodi? On my FTV, when I do that, my Kodi at start will show a hazy blank screen. It will stay like that for a few seconds (If you hit the back button on FTV remote while the Kodi screen is still hazy, Kodi will exit out without creating your base folders in /.kodi. This saves you the hassle of deleting them again after you have restored your mount) and then Kodi will start. But you will not see any addons/customizations etc. Kodi will start as if its a default clean install. Its a fail safe play by Kodi so that it does not crash. If you look at "/sdcard/Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi", you will find that it is not empty and you will see the 6 subfolders in there. To fix this, once you can properly mount again, just shut down Kodi and restart it and it will start with all your stuff intact. You can either leave the ".kodi" folder in your /sdcard as is or you can delete them again, it makes no difference.

I have been testing this for last couple of days, and the performance is just fine (just a tad slow but not a killer). The exit of Kodi (from its home page) is slow though, it takes around 7 seconds for it to shut down on my FTV. I would imagine that NFS should be faster than CIFS, but I have not tested that yet.