Hi,
I’m a huge fan of Kodi and have it set up on multiple devices. As such, I’m very thrilled to see that profiles are one area of GSOC proposals. As the wiki page isn’t very detailed yet, I thought I’d share some ideas that I had about profiles, that might also be divided into multiple projects (as the wiki page suggests).
- Easier setup for multiple devices
In my last attempt (admittedly still during Kodi 15) it wasn’t really straight forward to have a central profile (e.g. on a NAS / server). I’d propose something like this workflow:- User wants to create profile
- Kodi should ask if it’s a One-Device setup (“OD”) or a Multiple-Device setup (“MD”)
- If user chose “OD”, Kodi can (more or less) continue with the current profile creation steps
- If user chose “MD”, Kodi should ask if the profiles should be created on the currently used device or some network device
- For network device, Kodi will need some login and password input fields and then a way to test whether a suitable DB exists
- Hierarchical structure of profiles
Scenario: I have a shared profile with my GF on the TV in the living room, but we both have Kodi on our Android smartphones as well with private profiles. Suppose we’re watching some series. We’re watching S01E01 together on the TV -> this should lead to S01E01 be marked as “watched” in the combined profile as well as the “descendant” profiles on our phones. After that, she’s watching E02 on her smartphone and a couple of hours/days later, I watch it on my smartphone. If all descendant profiles have watched the episode, the “ancestor” profile should mark the episode as watched, too. Same goes for movies, of course. - Better age-restrictions
I know this is a difficult subject and has been discussed before, but I’m still throwing it in: If you have children, it would be nice to specify some age-restriction (or better yet: specify a birthday for that profile, so that it could automatically adapt). I’d propose that the user (e.g. the parent) that sets up the profile must choose the service (e.g. imdb) from which to get the age restrictions from. If no age restriction can be found, the content is *not* displayed at all.
This will not be perfect, but still be a lot better than nothing (again: last time I thoroughly checked was at Kodi 15 times, so this might be obsolete). There probably should be a way for the master user to manually override the automatic setting (e.g. approve some movies and disprove others, regardless of the imdb-age-setting).