TV Boxes build

Quote from chewitt

It's relatively simple to change the skin that's embedded in the imag but add-ons require build-system packages to be created to pre-install them. Both tasks will require you to understand our build-system (which has no manual or instructions). IMHO it is easier to set-up one box, take a backup, restore the backup to the other boxes. This also preserves the ability of skins and add-ons to update themselves when there are new versions available. If you embed the add-on into the read-only SYSTEM image this capability is lost.

Hey Chewitt,

I thought I would pop on here as I have pretty much the same question. I will be rolling out to hundreds of boxes, so backup and restore becomes much more of a labouriuos process. I need a super fast way to quickly flash an image onto these boxes.

I have managed to unpack and repack the SYSTEM image of an MX3-Plus tv box using squashfas (with the help of kszaq - thanks mate!!)

Is it as simple as copying my custom addons, temp and userdata folders into the /usr/share/kodi folder, and then resquashing the SYSTEM file? Then rebuild the libreelec-update.zip, and resign it. I tried that but it doesn't seem to work. It installs fine, but it is a base install, no customizations.

I have created a repository for all of my custom addons, and this repo is installed as an addon that I am adding to the SYSTEM image, so I can control updates all addons on all my rolled out boxes.

My concern is that you seem to imply that any addons that I want to roll out in a system image, would need to be put into a build-system package. Perhaps what I am trying to do is more complicated than I think.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Cheers,
Ken