[lidgaca]

Hi

I have a raspberry pi 4 (8 gb) on my internal network to run my kodi instance. Media files are all nfs'd off onto a NAS box. The system has been rock solid for more years than I can remember ... As it's on my internal firewalled network I have never been worried about security issues, the kodi box can't reach the internet, and the internet can't reach my kodi box.

But all good things come to an end, right ? So I *really* ought to upgrade this box and run a modern version of kodi on it. My current kodi instance has a large database which has been carefully maintained (often manually, when auto-scraping fails ...) so I really don't want to loose it.

My normal method would be ...

Backup the contents of the home directory where kodi runs to the NAS box (mainly to save the .kodi directory)
Rebuild the OS and the kodi software from an empty SD card
Copy the backup back into the new clean home directory ...

Et voila  (I hope). But ...

Does anyone know if the current latest kodi will accept the .kodi directory of the 18.X version that I am starting from ?
Is there anything I can do to help (remove my addons for example)
Is there anything else to be wary of ?

I know this is a big jump (3 full versions + various fractions), so I am a little anxious to hear real-world examples of updates that have worked well / updates that turned into horror stories / whatever ...

I also know that I can probably perform this in multiple steps (18 -> 19, 19 -> 20, 20 -> 21) but that will be a lot more work. I'll probably have to build my own versions of the down-dated kodi's for example, as I'm guessing that finding an pi4 / kodi 19 package will not be possible.

So, any thoughts ?


-- Chris

[DarrenHill]

It will accept it, but you've hit one of the more difficult updates.

V18.x (Leia) was based on Python 2, whereas all the more modern versions are based on Python 3. What that means is no addons which run on Leia will work on Omega (or any newer version from Matrix upwards).
In most cases there are upgraded Python 3 versions available and so the system should update and find those, but depending on what (and how) you have installed addons on your system, there may be some which don't update properly and will need to be done manually (or dropped if no new version is available).

Kodi on Pi isn't actually supplied by us (Team Kodi). There are specific tailored versions available (LibreElec, OSMC etc) which are provided by third party teams alongside partial or full OS's to support them.
Also there is the version in the apt repo of Raspberry Pi OS, but that is managed by the Pi Foundation itself.
Hence unless you're building your own versions from source, as you say it won't be easy to find versions of Matrix (v19), at least without also installing an older version of the OS to match, do the upgrade to that then back up and wipe followed by a newer more up to date install.

In the end though, as long as you keep your original SD card (or a backup of it), you've nothing much to loose aside from time as you can always roll back if things to do bad on you.

[lidgaca]

Thanks for you quick and very detailed reply !

Lots to think about here ... I guess my first stop is a couple of 64 Gb sd cards for experimentation !

I've done a bit of searching, and I can see that some people like to drop the db down to .nfo files and restore from them ... that is a possibility for me as well, but a bit of messing around (by default kodi does not have write privs to the NAS box).

I'll let the forum know how I went on ... or cry for help if it all goes Pete Tong !


-- Chris