When you Kodi breaks on an Nvidia Shield

Kodi (formerly XBMC, formerly Xbox Media Connect) has been an awesome tool for us to have a nice front end so that handles all the DVDs and other things we have digitally in the house.

Since nVidia Shield is really an Android device, this is really an Android application. It basically indexes a network server and then adds the metadata like who the actors are and the date and so forth with scrapers.

The problem is that in the last release, our Kodi started hanging. The metadata scraping didn’t work and the search for network sources didn’t either. So what can you do about it? And Kodi started hanging on boot.

There are a few people who have this problem and the basic recommendations:

Use ES Explorer to look through the file system for the userdata file that lives in a bunch of different places but on Android Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/userdata/ is the location
Delete the application and start again.

What happened for us was that deleting the network share didn’t work because the userdata file is still live and seems corrupted.

Moreover, when deleting the Kodi application this didn’t seem to help at all initially. We had to do a complete reboot before a reinstall worked. In fact with a reinstall, Kodi actually hung on startup.

Net, net, hopefully your Kodi does work. If it doesn’t, then you need to:

Check and delete your UserData file.
If that doesn’t work, then delete Kodi
Reboot the Shield
Go and check to see if the UserData file is there still
If not then do the installation of Kodi.

And all is good. There was some debate about whether increasing the user buffer logging might help, but I didn’t try that. Also on trying if you have a pure hang then you can try:

Turn off the graphics and other acceleration, but my problem was a hang.