Friday, March 4, 2016

Another Kodi v16 "Jarvis" Upgrade

A few weeks ago, I updated Kodi on my Fire TV to version 16. At the time, the most recent version was a release candidate build. I've since updated to the release version.
Unlike last time, I did an in-place upgrade. Firestarter makes it easy with a Kodi section on the Updates screen. Just a matter of a few button selections, and a few minutes wait for the download to finish.

Like the last update, I found that my custom version of the Trakt.tv add-on had been overwritten by a newer version of the unmodified add-on. I had to jump through a few extra hoops to get it back up to speed: first GitHub decided not to work on my Windows machine and had to be fixed, then adbFire wouldn't connect to the Fire TV and had to be upgraded. Nothing related to Kodi, though. Once I got through those logistical issues, the updated add-on worked just fine.

I even fixed an extra bug while I was at it. The Trakt add-on had stopped displaying notifications, and it turns out the reason was an added attempt to set a non-existent episode ID in the scrobble code. I'm not sure why that addition was made in the newest version of the add-on, so I didn't want to remove it...maybe it actually works for some use case that I never run into. I put a simple error catching block around it, so it will still attempt the same action, but any errors won't cause further issues. Having done that, the notifications work again.

Mostly good news on the problems that I used to have in version 15. The crashes while watching MythTV recordings have not yet reappeared. Looks like the most recent updates to the MythTV add-on and base Kodi code have corrected those. The problem of Crunchyroll videos slowing down and skipping audio was still present in the release candidate build, but I haven't seen it yet in the final release version. It only happens when I've watched a few episodes in a row, and I can fix it by deleting the Kodi cache from the Fire TV's system menu and restarting. So it's not a major problem, even if it does come back, but with luck it's gone for good.

All things considered, the Jarvis version of Kodi is working out well. Now, if version 17 will just set the MythTV recording infolabels correctly, I'd be a very happy Kodi user.