Openelec migration to Libreelec info outdated

1st Official Post

    Hello,

    I just learned that openelec is outdated. I found out that when I was having trouble, soft reset, and tried to rescan my library I am having lots of problems. Thetvdb doesnt work anymore, etc. So I learned that openelec is old news. I found that you can migrate, but the information on youtube is outdated. I cant find the manual update???

    So My concern is, if I do a full install so to speak, what about my library on my htpc? I am afraid it will wipe it out. Can anybody point me in the right direction? I am running a htpc thats amd based (not raspberry pi or anything) and currently running Kodi 17.3 on Openelec 8.0.4. Any help is appreciated!

    • Official Post
    Quote from jimbee

    I found that you can migrate, but the information on youtube is outdated.

    Perhaps Youtube is not your best of news/source material, it's better to get it from us instead. :)

    And yes, OpenELEC is a dead project for at least 4 years now.

    Quote from jimbee

    if I do a full install so to speak, what about my library on my htpc? I am afraid it will wipe it out.

    Yes, it will... -IF- you are not using a remote MySQL database. I'm also hoping that are you do not have your media (videos, music) collection on the same OpenELEC pc, but elsewhere on an external disk (USB, NAS, whatever). Right?

    So when you are using the default local database, it's recommended that you do a Video Library Export, so all metadata will be stored in nfo files next to the respective videos (the same applies to the music collection). But first, you will need to enable the watched status and resume points in your advancedsettings.xml file, in order to save that info before you do that export. After that, do a Backup via OpenELEC's Settings Add-on. If you know how to also copy files from your OpenELEC setup manually, that would also be a bonus.

    Since the system partition of LibreELEC has grown over time, you cannot simply upgrade from OpenELEC to LibreELEC. A full/clean install in mandatory. That said, since you are running such an old setup, it isn't a bad idea to start fresh altogether, as it will get you a cleaned up video library and refreshed thumbnail cache folder. As long as you did the Video Library Export, rescraping your media collection should be pretty fast as all metadata is already available. No need for Internet access there. And you will get rid of any unnecessary old clutter.

    • Official Post

    Plan B .. is boot from an Ubuntu Live/Rescue USB and use gparted or similar to shrink the existing /storage partition and then grow the /flash partition with boot files. It will be painfully slow, but it can be done. Then you can do a simple update from OE to LE. I'd probably do the initial step to LE 8.0 as this the same era as the last OE release, and then make a backup of the Kodi config before doing an update to 9.2.2. As a rule Kodi updates fine from older releases, but there is usually some add-on breakage and that's where you're likely to hit roadbumps. If you have a backup on local disk, it's easy to experiment and tweak the pre-update config until things are successful.

    Quote from Klojum

    Perhaps Youtube is not your best of news/source material, it's better to get it from us instead. :)

    And yes, OpenELEC is a dead project for at least 4 years now.

    Yes, it will... -IF- you are not using a remote MySQL database. I'm also hoping that are you do not have your media (videos, music) collection on the same OpenELEC pc, but elsewhere on an external disk (USB, NAS, whatever). Right?

    So when you are using the default local database, it's recommended that you do a Video Library Export, so all metadata will be stored in nfo files next to the respective videos (the same applies to the music collection). But first, you will need to enable the watched status and resume points in your advancedsettings.xml file, in order to save that info before you do that export. After that, do a Backup via OpenELEC's Settings Add-on. If you know how to also copy files from your OpenELEC setup manually, that would also be a bonus.

    Since the system partition of LibreELEC has grown over time, you cannot simply upgrade from OpenELEC to LibreELEC. A full/clean install in mandatory. That said, since you are running such an old setup, it isn't a bad idea to start fresh altogether, as it will get you a cleaned up video library and refreshed thumbnail cache folder. As long as you did the Video Library Export, rescraping your media collection should be pretty fast as all metadata is already available. No need for Internet access there. And you will get rid of any unnecessary old clutter.

    Oh man, wish I knew I could save watched status before I did the soft reset! All that info is gone so I know I have to do a new scrape and everything. Anyways, I opened up my htpc and found the good news is that my media is on a different hard drive. I unplugged the power to it and turned the system back on and it says the file is missing when trying to play any movie so I think Im good! So now, to just figure out how to install this thing fresh and I'll start over.

    However, regarding covers, it looks like themoviedb went through an update and TONS of covers are missing. What gives?

    • Official Post

    Currently, Kodi uses TheMovieDB be default for both movies and TVshows as there have been a number of problems in the past when scraping TV show episodes. You can still use TVDB, but .. YMMV as they say, but fanart shouldn't be a problem. Perhaps the URLs of them simply changed over time. But since you already did a reset, I'd start with the defaults.

    Keep your media disk unplugged for now just to be sure, and you can install the new LibreELEC via a USB stick.

    What sort of hardware is in that HTPC? The graphics card is the most important player for Kodi.