Kodi Community Forum

I have both XBMC and Kodi installed.

cal@leela:~$ xbmc --version
XBMC Media Center 12.3 Debian package version:2:12.3+dfsg1-3ubuntu1
Copyright © 2005-2012 Team XBMC - http://www.xbmc.org
cal@leela:~$ kodi --version
18.0-ALPHA1 Git:20171114-nogitfound Media Center Kodi
Copyright © 2005-2013 Team Kodi - http://kodi.tv

When I first started Kodi, it said it updated my ~/.xbmc/ to work with Kodi.

Did Kodi simply rename .xbmc to .kodi? Can I symlink .kodi to .xbmc so XBMC still has my settings?

I want to continue using XBMC. It works better in my obscure setup, and I don't want to bother anyone with how to make Kodi work if XBMC was working fine all along.

Also, in Kodi, how do I move something from Videos to TV Shows without losing information like how much I've watched?

You have to think about the following....From the time XBMC has changed it's name to Kodi (from version 13 to 14), ppl have updated their kodi via the PPA. Therefore it needs ofc some migration from older installs. In the case XBMC was installed before there was a ~/.xbmc folder which needs to be migrated to get recognized by Kodi later on. So, in my little knowledge, Kodi checks if a ~/.xbmc folder exists and if yes, rename it to ~/.kodi and then start the database migrations.

Running a very very old, outdated and unsupported version of Kodi (XBMC) in that case, will always cause the renaming from ~/.xbmc to ~/.kodi.

generally the same will happen if you run 2 instances of Kodi (version 15 and 16 for example). Both will refer to the same ~/.kodi folder. So keeping things separated in that way might not work, because you might confuse your databases.

symlinking ~/.kodi to ~/.xbmc wont work as well, because XBMC, and in your case version 12, has completely different database versions. There are way too much changes at those versions to get this working. gui-settings, another default skin etc. etc. etc...

What might work is using Kodi as a snap package which is explained (but not really worked on at the moment) here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=315213

Otherwise you are out of luck.

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master...in#L86-L96 is the code that is run.

in short, once it was migrated and ~/.kodi exists, you can (re)create  ~/.xbmc and it won't be touched by kodi anymore

ah, good to know.

And sorry for my mistake