I love Kodi, I use it on my aftv I have it installed on a USB drive of my 4K Max and it works perfectly. I got the USB drive because of the limited space of the aftv. Unfortunately it seems to keep the data files and the thumbnails Etc on the firestick itself so I'm left with a firestick that's giving me a low storage warning and I only have Kodi installed on the USB drive and that's it, no apps at all. It obviously needs room to grow because by my calculations it shows to be two and a half gigs on the USB drive and it's also taking up about 4 gigabytes on the fire stick. I don't have a PC but I can access the Fire TV with my Android phone and get to a command prompt through ADB shell, how do I move the datafile to my USB drive from my internal storage of the aftv? It keeps getting bigger!
2022-04-23, 08:26
Depending on the size and flow of your media collection, Kodi will auto-create thumbnails for your videos and add-on streams. So if you are a hoarder of movies and tvshows which remain on your USB drive all the time, so will their thumbnails. If you are more likely to watch videos in general, remove them, and move onto the next, thumbnails of the old videos will remain in the thumbnail cache folder. Which may pile up in the end. In that case, one option is to delete the whole thumbnails folder as well as the Textures13.db file in the Database folder. That will have Kodi recache all necessary thumbs again over time.
I have no experience whatsoever with AFTV devices, so I don't know what is possible or not, but perhaps you can have Kodi offload the thumbnails folder to the USB drive by using pathsubstitution. First copy Kodi's thumbnails folder to a location on the USB drive, and then place the pathsubtitution redirect in the advancedsettings.xml file.
Note that this method does not have a 100% guarantee. It's a "YMMV" situation. Whatever you have installed as skins and add-ons that is taking up disk space, that's your choice. Sometimes you just need a bigger tool for the job.
I have no experience whatsoever with AFTV devices, so I don't know what is possible or not, but perhaps you can have Kodi offload the thumbnails folder to the USB drive by using pathsubstitution. First copy Kodi's thumbnails folder to a location on the USB drive, and then place the pathsubtitution redirect in the advancedsettings.xml file.
Note that this method does not have a 100% guarantee. It's a "YMMV" situation. Whatever you have installed as skins and add-ons that is taking up disk space, that's your choice. Sometimes you just need a bigger tool for the job.
2022-04-23, 08:39
I had the same issues when I was running aftv, I'm not sure if this will work in your scenario, but I was running my videos and music from my computer and network streaming it. I found the best way to avoid the storage issue was to run mysql on my computer which hosts the datafile on the computer now, it comes with a bunch of other advantages connecting multiple devices, sharing watched and in progress lists. If you aren't streaming your videos through your network then this solution won't help you. However if you are it's worth looking up, you can find a bunch of info on it by click on the Kodi wiki and searching for mysql.
2022-04-23, 10:58
The database is not the big problem here. A typical Kodi database involves only 35-50 MB in total disk space. Hardly a concern as some of the thumbnails can be equal in size individually. Using an external database does have some plusses, but they are not really the point here because thumbnail files are not stored in the video database.
2022-05-04, 19:59
Instead of auto-creation you can also downloader thumbnails in different sizes and high quality. I generally used this tool best Youtube thumbnail downloader and it helped me a lot.
2022-05-04, 20:05
2022-05-09, 06:12
It IS possible but a bit of a hassle. Warning : you must assume that you will need to reinstall every app on the Firestick, have a working installation of adb and sort of know what it is.
Also, sorry OP, you will need a PC. So this might not be for you. But even without using the tool you might be able to figure out what it does and Google how to move the data and configure Kodi manually.
First of all it is important to distinguish between the two ways a firestick can use a USB drive, there is no way around it
1) expanding the internal storage so it can hold more apps.
2) using it as external storage , more meant to be unplugged when the user wants to. aka no critical app data.
You can have both of them in two different ways : you partition the usb stick yourself with adb, or you use two usb sticks.
How to format a single usb drive into the two partitions 1) and 2) is found here : https://troypoint.com/expand-fire-tv-sti...l-storage/. Obviously this WILL destroy all data on your USB drive (!!!).
Install Kodi to 1), run Kodi at least once.
Download adblink (so not adblink2) for Windows, OS X or Linux from http://jocala.com/adblink.html
Configure it to connect to your firestick.
Use 'Move Kodi Data'. It will adjust a few kodi settings (I assume the bit that Klojum mentioned) and do the actual transfer to 2)
Good luck.
Also, sorry OP, you will need a PC. So this might not be for you. But even without using the tool you might be able to figure out what it does and Google how to move the data and configure Kodi manually.
First of all it is important to distinguish between the two ways a firestick can use a USB drive, there is no way around it
1) expanding the internal storage so it can hold more apps.
2) using it as external storage , more meant to be unplugged when the user wants to. aka no critical app data.
You can have both of them in two different ways : you partition the usb stick yourself with adb, or you use two usb sticks.
How to format a single usb drive into the two partitions 1) and 2) is found here : https://troypoint.com/expand-fire-tv-sti...l-storage/. Obviously this WILL destroy all data on your USB drive (!!!).
Install Kodi to 1), run Kodi at least once.
Download adblink (so not adblink2) for Windows, OS X or Linux from http://jocala.com/adblink.html
Configure it to connect to your firestick.
Use 'Move Kodi Data'. It will adjust a few kodi settings (I assume the bit that Klojum mentioned) and do the actual transfer to 2)
Good luck.
