Kodi Community Forum

Hi Guys,

I have not really used profiles in the past. I have a neat setup at home with 3 Kodi instances (Lounge, Family, Rumpus). I use a shared MySQL backend, and a unRaid NAS for content.

This has been an amazing setup for years. No Profiles required as each instance is configured the same.

Now I have kids (5 and 3), and we travel to see the Grandparents 5 hours by car, about every 4 weeks.

I have just purchased 2x 7" Android Tablets for the kids to use. Slight problem, our 3 year old is not great with using the touch based device, and our 5 year old is just learning how to read. This makes navigating KODI a bit harder for them. I don't think this is a KODI problem, it is intuitive enough.

I have a 2Tb 2.5" Seagate Wireless HDD. I have used http://www.hackwifidrive.com/ to unlock the features, and now have a mobile hotspot with SMB support.

I plan to use KODI on Android to connect to the Seagate-WiFi-NAS in the car. This solves the content problem, I can carry vast amounts of data without having to worry about the 16Gb device limits.

I can then use YATSE to remotely control the KODI instances in the back seat! This will be very helpful to start content for the kids, and stop it when required.

Now that you have the entire history, now time for the feature request.

When roaming with the Android Tablet, the SMB sources are \\seagate\movies and \\seagate\tv. (Connected to the seagate.wifi SSID)
When in the house with Android Tablet, the SMB sources are \\unraid\movies and \\unraid\tv. (Conntected to the home.wifi SSID)

It would be fairly cool if KODI could make a profile selection based upon the Network that the device is connected to!

That way KODI could seamlessly change access to content based on WHERE the device is. This would remove any inaccessible sources and remove confusion for the not so savvy KODI user (kids).

I almost have same situation as yours
At home I have 2 sets of mysql / kodi profiles, one for me and wife and other for kids.
Then I created 3 profiles on my son tablet kodi
1- Home. it has mysql settings and connected to home Nas for when he wants to watch on his tablet at home
2- Local. it only reads whats inside the tablet
3- Remote. it reads from wifi HDD

my son is a kodi pro so I dont need to switch between profiles for him,
but you can create profiles and switch between them before give the kids their tablets

Exactly the same as I run my SPMC install on my tablet. Three profiles are set up (plus the master one):

1) Home - connects to my home NAS and uses MySQL.
2) WebDAV - for when I'm travelling, with source set up with onboard library and using a WebDAV connection back to the NAS.
3) Offline - as it says, just uses sources on the flash memory and SD card in the tablet.

Works fine for me, just chose which one I want when I start up the app.

the issue I see with network aware profiles is, that a profile not only switches the sources, but also skin settings, add-ons etc - so depending on what you probably changed in profile A won't automatically be reflected in profile B, which makes the "seamless switch" not as seamless as you want it to be in every scenario.

IMO better would be the approach Montellese was/is working on, that can dynamically import UPNP devices if available and mark content from unavailable sources as such (or even hide them). So you would always stay in your profile but the content would adjust to what's available.

Might that not be a better solution to the problem?

Btw - I'm not sure if add-ons have the power to do so yet, but you could probably write a service add-on that switches to a certain profile depending on SSID

Another option - just use kodi in the house / spmc in the car (or vice-versa).

(2016-04-20, 13:47)da-anda Wrote: [ -> ]the issue I see with network aware profiles is, that a profile not only switches the sources, but also skin settings, add-ons etc - so depending on what you probably changed in profile A won't automatically be reflected in profile B, which makes the "seamless switch" not as seamless as you want it to be in every scenario.

IMO better would be the approach Montellese was/is working on, that can dynamically import UPNP devices if available and mark content from unavailable sources as such (or even hide them). So you would always stay in your profile but the content would adjust to what's available.

Might that not be a better solution to the problem?

Btw - I'm not sure if add-ons have the power to do so yet, but you could probably write a service add-on that switches to a certain profile depending on SSID

da-anda, having sources dynamically disappear would be a great option. I don't really have a need to switch the entire profile (egkin).
I would like to stop my kids cant attempting to use a source that doesn't exist. You mentioned UPNP, but would the also be applied to SMB?

I am not a big fan of UPNP but the concept from Montellese is great.

Happy to have a longer list of SMB shares, then have KODI hide the non-available share from me.