Sync favourites between devices

Hi all, using this post as a guide I’ve successfully got the favourites.xml on my server syncing to my 2 Veros and laptop. However in practice the sync is a little clunky.

1 - Sync is only in one direction, so only favourites saved on the server (which isn’t in the most convenient location and therefore isn’t used to view media) will propagate to the various clients.

2 - Changes to the favourites.xml file will require a reboot of the client (or at least stop/start mediacenter command) in order to show in the GUI.

Has anyone got a more workable solution for syncing favourites between devices (possibly involving a cloud service?) and cares to share?

Thanks!

I’ve not tried playing with this but my suspicion would be that the information is being kept in RAM and only written out when some trigger happens similar to guisettings.xml. I try seeing if reloading the skin is enough to get it to update which may give you a bit of an improvement. If you have an OSMC remote you can do this by holding down the select/OK button when you are in the home window (the top level in Kodi where it normally boots into) or for a quick test otherwise via ssh you could…
kodi-send -a "ReloadSkin()"

Ultimately though I think favorites is going to be a bit suboptimal for live sharing as it was never written to accommodate such a use. What exactly is it that you are trying to accomplish with the favorites? If you let us know of what information more specifically you were trying to share across clients then perhaps someone could suggest a different approach to get you there.

I stumbled upon the post linked in OP and thought that (relatively) automatic favourite sharing between clients would be a cool feature that my MySQL based setup currently doesn’t provide.

It’s not a massive issue at all, if someone has a solution then great!

Favorites isn’t a feature that I’ve ever found myself using but if your setup with MySQL then if your looking for some kind of pinning of certain movies or shows or something like that then I would suggest to play around with widgets and tagging and see if that will get you where you want to be. There isn’t the support for putting cross media items in the same list like in favorites, but since tags are part of your shared database if you setup the same widget on all clients that work off the same tag then in that way you could add or remove items from a widget by adding or removing a custom tag from your media I believe.

To be completely honest, if it’s going to be something that needs experimenting with I’ll leave it for now. I only tried the favourites path sub as it looked quick and easy enough, just didn’t work that well in practice!

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