I’ve been using Kodi as my PVR for a week now and I’ve discovered a few quirks, solutions and tweaks that have make a big difference to the whole user experience.  Overall I’m increasingly impressed with how Kodi has developed both at it’s core and the addons.  Since my last post Kodi 16 has also released so I’ve upgraded to the RTW version.

Skin

I spent a while trying out pretty much all the skins Kodi offered through the UI and ended up using Rapier.  It’s pretty minimal but very well laid out, customisable and easy to navigate.  Some of the others we’re nice but this one just felt right.  Hardly a scientific comment but look and feel are important and this one fits the bill.

Timeshift Issues

I kept hitting an issue where the PVR addon would disconnect when I tried to timeshift, I use this feature a lot so it was something I needed to fix.  I’ve only one hard drive in the machine and despite being an SSHD I thought it may be the disk causing the problem.  I’ve heard my colleagues at work talk about RAM disks and as I’m only ever using a couple of GB of the 8GB of RAM my HTPC has it seemed worth a try.  I did a quick search for software and found SoftPerfect’s RAM Disk, installed it, created a 3GB RAM disk and moved the timeshift folder in TV Server Configuration to it and the problems disappeared.  It’s made a massive difference!

Remote Control

I’ve a Media Center IR receiver hooked up to my PC which was great for Media Center but the Guide, Info and similar buttons were WMC specific.  Thankfully this was trivial to fix thanks to the MCRemote addon!  Installation was easy via the addon repository but configuration took me a while, mostly as I didn’t RTFM…

First off, as it edits the registry you’ll need to run Kodi as admin though you’ll only need to do this when updating the settings.  You’ll find it installed in Kodi under programs, open it then select “Apply current settings” and it’ll keymap the guide, DVR, info and other buttons to work in Kodi.  Reboot Windows and you’re good to go.

The only thing not mapped is starting Kodi using the green button, easily done though.  Find the shortcut to Kodi in the start menu, right click and bring up properties.  Under shortcut add a random combination you don’t use anywhere else then open Kodi as an admin.  Run the MCERemote addin, select “Configure MCERemote settings” then find the entry for the green button and voila!

That’s it for now, I’ll let my changes bed in and keep track of any other tweaks and will post anything cool as I find it.