[kurosh]

Skin needs updating to support Kodi v21 Omega. Anyone got any ideas whether this skin will be updated?

@bsoriano?

[wookielover]

You can update the skin's addon.xml file and it will work with Omega. 

Navigate to your addons folder -  .kodi/addons/skin.amber
Edit the file addons.xml
Change the line "xbmc.gui" version="5.15.0" to 
"xbmc.gui" version="5.17.0"

restart kodi and you can enable the skin. 

Mileage may vary as I did no other testing whatsoever and know nothing about the dependencies in the skin which may or may not work with Omega.

[wookielover]

the folder for the Amber skin is 

 .kodi/addons/skin.amber

Can't edit my original response for some reason though.

[DarrenHill]

Can't edit my original response for some reason though.

Because you're still a newbie account, you haven't got edit privs yet (it's a generic board anti-spam measure).
I've updated your previous post to correct it.

This skin is sadly currently fairly much unmaintained, as unfortunately @bsoriano had to step away from things for personal reasons.
The above tweak will allow Amber to load, but of course none of the new functions that are available in Omega will work through the skin.
And as noted above there may be other more hidden compatability issues with it, but at least it may keep things going for a while longer until either someone steps forward to pick up the skin support (or if @bsoriano is able to pick things up again, which would be wonderful) or it has to be archived.

[Morphy99]

Why is Kodi being pushed out on the Android app store with incompatible stock skins from v20? There needs to be some kind of in kodi notification from the kodi team for these kind of breaking changes if it's ever to be considered a user friendly app on modern platforms.

[DarrenHill]

You mean a bit like this one?

Plus the same in the various beta versions that have been around for months to allow skin developers to prepare and make their skins ready for the changes in Omega?

We led the horses to water as best we could...

[Morphy99]

You mean a bit like this one?

I meant a notification in Kodi itself. I guess I was hoping Kodi might have matured into a more mainstream media player client with existence on Play Store but I guess it's still one for those who have to trail release notes before updating.

I'm not blaming anyone for the lack of an update to the skin btw. It happens. But any addons broken from the official repo should carry a breaking change warning before Kodi is updated automatically.

[DarrenHill]

The default skin (Estuary) works with Omega, and at initial launch there were other skins available.

In the repo, the ones that weren't compatible were marked as broken, which is all we can do as generally we aren't the authors of them.

And to do what you were hoping for, we would have to issue another version of Nexus to include that code to do a notification, whilst at the time all effort was focussed on Omega.
It was decided that as the Omega update didn't stop Kodi being used (as it would just default back to Estuary if the previous skin was incompatible) then that was the best we could do.
Basically Nexus would need to know what is coming up in Omega, which doesn't make sense.
And addons quite commonly break in new versions of Kodi and require update. That's nothing new, and skins in the end are basically addons (except Estuary).

The only other option would be to delay Omega until the skinners updated their skins, but it has been known and advertised to them for almost a year now that the API bump was coming.
Some skinners did make preparatory Omega versions, others prefer to wait until release to do the work and incorporate new features and other changes. Unfortunately in this case the API change broke the skin in the process, which is what happened.
And of course other older skins are no longer maintained and supported by their authors for whatever reason, and so those skins will possibly never work with Omega or any later version of Kodi.

So if we delayed Omega just for that, then we wouldn't get anything done and no-one who is using a stable release would get any new features or bug fixes and in the end we may as well close up shop.

[Morphy99]

And to do what you were hoping for, we would have to issue another version of Nexus to include that code to do a notification

I'm not saying this should be a feature for Nexus, or indeed Omega as they're now stable. It would be amazing if someone worked on it for Omega but it doesn't even appear to be on the roadmap for v22?

Kodi being a 10ft interface and addons updating automatically from repos means a lot of users don't read your communications. A notification system, regardless of version, even an official addon would be of huge benefit to everyone. What if there is a major security flaw? How will you tell users that don't visit your forum, github or socials? 

Unfortunately on my Android device and probably many others, I can't disable updates for one particular app and disabling it for all is asking for problems. 

I appreciate you've done all you can to mitigate problems with broken skins but for a lot of less tech savvy users which have been using Kodi happily for a while, it's stopped working as they don't know what to do with Estuary. I'm clearly not expecting you to delay releases until they're fixed, but a heads up, a year in advance, would have been awesome. I can't even see anything on your socials about this, correct me if I'm wrong. To have the attitude "oh it's a new Kodi version, there are always broken addons" is kind of resigning yourself to a platform which will never embrace a larger audience because the bad user experiences. It's sad because I love Kodi and have supported you guys from years ago but I'm considering alternatives now because this broken update system really sucks.

[DarrenHill]

The update was for the skinners, not the general user base. It's here, from March 2023.

What you want would be lovely, but is also practically impossible. Most would either just click through it as they wouldn't know what to do with it, or as you say wouldn't know how to disable updates (or wouldn't want to), so it's a no-win situation.

We simply did the best we could, which was to give as much support to skinners so that when the update came, they were ready. But they're as much volunteers in doing this as we are, and it's down to them when (and indeed if) they did the work to support it.

What if there is a major security flaw? How will you tell users that don't visit your forum, github or socials? 

Just to pickup that question, we wouild issue a version update with the fix. We don't track our userbase, and as it's many millions in size we can't directly communicate with them anyway.
We had this very situation a while back when this forum got hacked, and there was no way to contact everybody even for the more limited audience of people with accounts here (there's no way to do it without us becoming spam).


Anyway we're taking this thread rather off-topic, so lets let it go back to Amber Omega support.

[Morphy99]

What you want would be lovely, but is also practically impossible.

I disagree, currently addons can display messages on start-up, it wouldn't be hard to implement the same for messages from Team Kodi surely? Something integrated with version check maybe? I also disagree that there's no point. I know if I saw a message a month before the release of Omega that some official Kodi repo addons were broken, I'd be straight on it looking for a workaround. People could then check forums, github etc. I don't understand why this concept isn't washing with you? Are you ashamed of things being broken on this latest release and don't want to publicise it?

Just to pickup that question, we wouild issue a version update with the fix. 

That's all very well but how long would that take?? I know Play Store approvals take forever at least. Surely a message to users immediately would be better??

Anyway we're taking this thread rather off-topic, so lets let it go back to Amber Omega support.

I agree and I'm happy for you to move this discussion to this new thread in feature requests if possible

[Morphy99]

Back on OT, I have seen that MikeSilvo has worked on some fixes for Amber in a fork. Seems to work OK for me so far.

[juleke147]

Back on OT, I have seen that MikeSilvo has worked on some fixes for Amber in a fork. Seems to work OK for me so far.

does it also work on android boxes?

[DarrenHill]

Could you wrap this up in a repo (either a stand-alone one or your own one) to make it easier to install and keep up to date?

Also depending on discussions with @bsoriano , maybe it's time to upload it to the official repo as well.

[sgm2011]

Thank you!