Path substitution

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Home icon grey.png   ▶ advancedsettings.xml ▶ Path substitution

Path substitutions are settings in advancedsettings.xml to force Kodi to use different file paths. These are processed in order, and are useful for substituting an absolute path on a PC with a path suitable for Kodi to handle. Path subs work for most file and folder paths. Path subs work across local and network paths, across different network protocols, and can even be used with some of the special protocol.

Special notes about path substitution for userdata files

Examples

Save as "advancedsettings.xml" in your userdata folder:

Example 1 - changing the path of music files
<advancedsettings>
 <pathsubstitution>
  <substitute>
    <from>SMB://192.168.1.19/Music/</from>
    <to>G:\Music\</to>
  </substitute>
 </pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>


Example 2 - changing where thumbnails are stored

Note: This will slowdown thumbnail loading, but might be worth it for low-memory devices. See also HOW-TO:Reduce disk space usage.

<advancedsettings>
 <pathsubstitution>
  <substitute>
    <from>special://profile/Thumbnails/</from>
    <to>PROTOCOL://YOUR_NETWORK_SHARE/Kodi/userdata/Thumbnails/</to>
  </substitute>
 </pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>

Please note that the usage of centralized thumbnail storage has produced less than 100% accurate results when applied on Kodi running on Intel and Raspberry Pi based hardware. Results with Kodi running on other hardware types are not yet known. A solution for the empty centralized thumbnails has yet to be been found.


Note: Not all special paths can be substituted. In particular, special://musicplaylists/ and special://videoplaylists/ should not be substituted, as internally these are multipaths that cannot be written to (thus saving of playlists will go elsewhere). Instead, one should use the advanced setting <system><playlistpath> to change this.

See also