Kodi Community Forum

Hi guys, I'm having a little trouble with a kodi build of mine that uses the AEON NOX skin.

I have put together a small build that I would like to use myself and also give to others however I keep running into a small but consistent problem I just can't get my head around concerning the use of custom background images.

My build is construction on a windows machine using Kodi 15.2 and the latest AEON NOX skin from the default kodi repo. The version of my build works flawlessly in windows on my machine but the trouble starts once I push the custom installation to an amazon fire tv or fire-stick using Adbfire.

Once I send my version of kodi to the android device, and it restores/boots up, the build works as it should for a brief moment, but upon the next launch all the custom background images that I have used in the build simply disappear and leaves nothing but a plain black scene or default background.

If I go to the skin settings on the android/amazon device and attempt to look or select the background images for each menu item, I see the URL of the image is still linked to that of the windows computer that the build was created on, for example, the background image URL will still be set to C://USERS/KODI/ADDONS/BACKGROUNDS/pic1.jpg

OK, so I can see the problem here, but I cant for the life of me figure out a way to resolve it. If i try to click on the set background image feature to re-allocate the custom background while on the android/amazon device, the file browser simply dumps me in the root folder of my firestick, and despite trawling through every single one of these folders I cant seem to find where about the kodi installation and its addon files are kept. I must admit I am totally lost concerning the filesystem and structure of android, there are folders called SYS, DEV, D, LIB, ETC, ANDROID etc etc and I am unable to find the actual folder where kodi and its images are stored so I can give kodi the correct path needed to display my custom background images.

Any help on this would be really appreciated, I hope I have done enough to describe my situation, I pretty much suck at stuff like this in general.

Sorry I think I'v goofed up posting this question in here, its obviously not a skin issue but rather a lack of understanding on how/where the kodi addon files are kept within the android file system. I think I should have posted a more relevant question in the android section. I will leave post open for now just in case anybody is kind enough to answer or explain my question above. Moderators can move this post if needed.

u need to use special://home/ not hard coded path

(2016-01-15, 12:29)TheWiz Wrote: [ -> ]u need to use special://home/ not hard coded path

Thank you my friend for your input. I have solved the issues I was having and here's how...

Firstly I had no idea how to find the kodi user files on the firestick/android mainly because I didn't understand the file structure of android, I'm good with Windows but never really messed with android. Anyhow I found the directory in the end and the most important feature I needed to do was to enable the ability to view hidden files. Not sure if this is skin specific or a global kodi setting but once I enabled the ability to view all the hidden and system files, I found the file path I needed in Android/Data/Kodi.Xmbc/files/ which then took me to the addon folder where my images were stored. Problem solved.

@marc118118 have you found a way to get those background images to show without having to go into the hidden files and folders on the android device? I'm having the same issue. Once i transfer my build to an android device, my images do not show. I only get a black screen. I was told to go into the guisettings.xml to point to special://home but I am not sure where to go. Please help!!!!!!

Not sure if you have solved this problem but thought i would post this as i had the same issue and it was driving me nuts. I had read about the special://home/ file path but didn't know where to put it. This is how i eventually did it. Go to the kodi folder and open user data. Create a new folder called background_pics and save all of your images there (make sure they have distinctive names like 'movies' or 'tv shows' etc so you know. Go into kodi and skin settings and set the backrounds you wish through the path 'home folder>user data>background_pics' and then close kodi.

Once that is done, go back to kodi folder and open user data. Inside there will be a folder called addon data or addon user data or something like that so open that and you will see an xml file called settings. Open this and in amongst everything else, you will see the file paths for all of your background images. Go through and find the paths for each of your images and replace everything before user data with special://home/ and then close and save it.

That's it so now when you transfer your build your background images should still be on there.

Further to my earlier reply, i have checked to make sure what i said was accurate and when you go to into the addon_data folder, you then go into the skin.aeon.nox.5 folder and the settings.xml file is located there.

I know this is a long post, but here is what I found, tested, and it worked.

In your user folder (%APPDATA%\kodi\userdata) go to addons.......Select the skin folder that you are using for your build (mine is skin.aeon.nox.5) open it..........open the backgrounds folder and insert all your images there.......Make sure you update the path location in kodi........Hope this helps as it took me about 3 days of searching.