Syncing profiles with server

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    That only works when all your Kodi devices are identical. Guisettings.xml can contain hardware-specific settings.

    Other than that, rsync should be somewhere in the tool addons.

    Installing a setup fully, and then copying it to your Kodi/LibreELEC clients is an easy and quick enough solution. No need for a syncing solution as the setup is a one-time event... Right? :)

    Quote from Klojum

    No need for a syncing solution as the setup is a one-time event... Right? :)

    Well, if you make changes on one device, the change should be reflected on all other devices. Settings, libraries, access control etc. So, we need some kind of sync.

    But the root problem is really this:

    KODI needs to offload the control plane on to a central server service. That service is in control of remoting devices. The service can synchronize two or more devices. The KODI on screen buttons really sends commands to the service, which in turn sends the action to the device.

    Then we can have true central control of how many devices we want, with multitenancy.

    KODI should be the video alternative as the Logitech Media Server is for music.

    The configuration is your personal settings and independent of the type of device.

    Of course, the KODI Server can exist in the same device as the KODI Client, just as piCorePlayer merges LMS and a software player onto the same device.

    I think the Chrorus 2 web interface is just awful and useless. It should be central to the KODI solution.

    • Official Post

    You can use a remote MySQL database for all metadata of movies, tvshows, music videos and music. Other than that, there is no "service" module that will take care of the settings of all connected Kodi clients.

    It may happen one day in the future, but currently there is no such server functionality planned for future Kodi releases. At this moment, Kodi is still set up as a multimedia CLIENT.

    It's okay to have your own opinion of Chorus2, other people seem to find Chorus2 useful. Personally I see no need for it to be a central solution. Some people wish to have identical setups throughout their home like yourself, others are okay with independent setups, for kids and for themselves.

    At the risk of necro-ing (as far as I can tell from searching nothing has changed on this front so I don't think this reply is outdated or anything) I would like to counter (part of) the bit about identical vs independent setups. Kodi has builtin 'profiles' that could let you have different setups for different users and sync the settings, so each user could configure settings how they personally want them, and then if they wanted to use those settings anywhere they could just add their profile-sync to the device and use it.

    I understand that it's not something that exists (though am, admittedly, a bit annoyed since it doesn't seem like a very absurd thing to want to do and Kodi is otherwise very full-featured) but I don't think it's fair to present it as "either you want identical setups everywhere or you want unique setups for different people". For me it's a matter of "I want my interfaces to look the same on my devices" (and, by proxy, I think other people who use my Jellyfin server through Kodi ought to be able to do the same)

    If it's not a feature it's not a feature (again, do find this a bit annoying, but it is what it is) but I did want to at least challenge this since it's one of the only mentions about syncing Kodi settings I can find anywhere on the internet (most things about it seem to be about syncing the database itself which isn't the same thing) and, IMO, it's a bit of a false dichotomy. One of the biggest advantages Kodi has over alternatives is it's deep customizability, but the second you want to use more than one device you're penalized heavily for using that 'advantage' since keeping your customizations in sync is a massive PITA.

    Again, don't mean to necro (especially since it doesn't seem like anything's even changed since this) but this is one of the only mentions of syncing kodi settings I can find and I really disagree with the dichotomy here of "devices are fully independent" and "devices are all the same"

    Nothing changed. Kodi allows you to create different profiles and to use a remote DB to store library and some (but not all) config data. However there is no concept of roaming profiles or a Kodi-internal way to keep data synchronised over multiple devices. You always need some form of external-to-Kodi sync, and being 'external' this inherently runs into data consistency issues.