[stuffedspacedog]

Hello, I'm the moderator on the G-Box forums (I know, I'm unpaid please don't hate me) and long-long-long-time XBMC user.

Many people on the G-Box forums are having problems with losing XBMC settings on Android, either randomly on reboot or due to changes in the hardware environment (cables plugged in or not, internet connectivity available or not, TV on or not).

This seems limited to skinsettings and defaultvideosettings within guisettings.xml.

As far as I can tell all other settings are retained.

This is on the G-Box Midnight 2.0/2.1/2.2, xD and Slav which all have f16ref boards with essentially the same Cortex A9/Mali400 configuration.

Others have said that the internal SD card is incorrectly mounted within the Android firmware, I don't know if that is true. I haven't yet found another Android app that suffered from the same condition.

I have three questions:

1. Does this happen on other hardware?
2. If it does happen on other hardware, does anyone have a fix?
3. If it doesn't happen on other hardware does anyone know what the cause might be?

I know G-Box doesn't have a great reputation here but the questions are not coming from the company, they're coming from the users.

If anyone can lend a hand it would be hugely appreciated.

[Ned Scott]

I haven't been reading as many of the Android threads as I used to be, but as far as I can tell, that's not a normal/common problem. I haven't seen it happen on any of the Android hardware that I've used XBMC on. If we have debug logs we can see if there are issues with loading those files upon startup. Could just be a simple permissions problem.

[stuffedspacedog]

OK thanks, let me try to get some debug logs and hopefully we can proceed from there.

[superfreak79]

Hello:

Thanks for starting this thread - unfortunately it doesn't seem to have gotten anywhere. Anyways, I recently purchased a MyGica ATV520 media player and am experiencing this settings loss issue. See: http://www.mygica.com/product.asp?id=166

superfreak

[jhhoffma]

I've only ever lost settings once, and that was when I installed the libstagefright build and somehow my userdata got wiped. Throwing my advancedsettings.xml back into the userdata directory fixed it. Hasn't happened since.

Maybe the guisettings.xml could be set as read-only to stop modification?

[sevenofone]

Any more progress on this? I've got this happening on 2 android boxes, (one is an M3 chipset but not gbox) and a minix box. What i've been doing is having a USB stick in the box with my original GUIsettings.xml file and then doing a quick file copy to the box, overwriting the incorrect one. It seems to happen randomly regardless of a clean xbmc shutdown or not. My questions are this:

1. On the M3 linux by J1nx et al, they are using external storage for the xbmc data directory which overcomes this problem and also avoids the storage of the box getting filled up with metadata etc, so has anyone done a similar thing for the android builds?

2. Failing that, would it be possible to do a patch that just copies the GUI and advancedsettings.xml files to external storage on shutdown and picks them up from there instead of internal storage?

I'm not a developer, but i'm wondering if anyone knows anyone who can change the xbmc config to pick those key files up from and save back to a USB stick or SD card as this would surely fix the problem 100%

[milesius]

I have the same Cortex A9/Mali400 configuration on a cheap chinese smart TV box.
I have the same issue as you described in that my xbmc seems to loose settings.
HOWEVER, on further examination it would seem that I actually have multiple xbmc directories scattered around my android system, thus the behavior is different each time I reboot, depending on where android grabs my prefs from.
This is annoying.

I basically have resigned to reboot several times until the right xbmc directory is loaded, which I can tell by the skin.

a fix would be grand!

[marlboroman1]

unless some makes with some debug logs this is not going to attract the attention of some who has skills to fix the problem

info on debug logs
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Log_file/Easy

finding log on android
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBM...r_and_logs

[stokdem]

Anyone found the solution to this problem?

[Koying]

unless some makes with some debug logs this is not going to attract the attention of some who has skills to fix the problem

info on debug logs
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Log_file/Easy

finding log on android
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBM...r_and_logs

[romano]

I have this problem too, will try this fix later, and will report here: https://springpad.com/#!/hasamba/explore...mcsettings
i have an ouya.


And now with the latest alpha i cannot change the language to mine(Portuguese), i hope fix above will solve it.

[jjhtpc]

Had the same problem, and found a workaround. I had documented it here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=183982
I hope this helps, I think you have to have root access to use this.

Others have had success with directory bind (also requires root). It seems if you don't have root you are in trouble.