Since I started to appreciate the convenience of Kodi as a media player for my home NAS, I started asking myself a question: how to synchronize Kodi between two (or more) different devices?
In my case Kodi accessed some multimedia files on the local network and therefore the two synchronized Kodi were obviously present on the same local network. To be precise, I installed Kodi on an NVIDIA Shield TV with Android and a Xiaomi Mi Box 3 always with Android. The idea is simple: tell both instances of Kodi that their database (i.e. the place to save the list of contents and other settings) is somewhere else, in order to use a single database for multiple installed Kodi applications.
Obviously the prerequisite is that this database is on the same network that Kodi is being used on. In my case it is the same Synology NAS where the multimedia files were present. This factor did not change the performance of the application.
The first thing to do is to export the Kodi state to your main device in order to re-import everything at the end. You can skip this step if you want to start everything from scratch and don’t want to save your settings.
Kodi database backup
- Go to Settings> Media Settings> Library> Export Library
- Then select Separately
This mode will create .info files alongside each of your multimedia files. It may be a bit chaotic for some but it is the safest way to backup. If you want more cleaning choose Single file .
At this point you need to create an external database on which to save the Kodi data. There are many different ways that obviously I can’t go into detail here, but if you have a Synology NAS like in my case you can follow this video guide . At this point you need to create a file with the name:
advancedsettings.xml
and internally use this data:
<advancedsettings>
<videodatabase>
<type> mysql </type>
<host> ***. ***. ***. *** </host>
<port> 3306 </port>
<user> kodi </ user>
<pass> kodi </pass>
</videodatabase>
<musicdatabase>
<type> mysql </type>
<host> ***. ***. ***. *** </host>
<port> 3306 </port>
<user> kodi </user>
<pass> kodi </pass>
</musicdatabase>
<videolibrary>
<importwatchedstate> true </importwatchedstate>
<importresumepoint> true </importresumepoint>
</videolibrary>
</ advancedsettings>
If you only have an audio or music database, you can remove the corresponding block. Obviously you will have to change the host entries with the IP of your database, as well as the port , user and pass with the port, username and password of your mysql database. At this point you will need to transfer the file to its settings folder. Here you will find the various addresses , in the case of Android it is:
Android / data / org.xbmc.kodi / files / .kodi / userdata /
At this point, close and reopen Kodi to access your new database, obviously you won’t have your old libraries right now. Just re-import from the same menu as before, or add the source of the multimedia files as a disk to use and the various nfo files will be automatically recognized . The same advancedsettings.xml file at this point can be used on any other device on the local network to automatically synchronize the contents present and also the point where you stopped viewing.
