Creating your Own Kodi build Part Seven

Welcome to Creating your own Kodi build Part Seven. This handy series will give you all the steps you need to make your own Kodi build.

Part One of this series can be found HERE

Part Two of this series can be found HERE

Part Three of this series can be found HERE

Part Four of this series can be found HERE

Part Five of this series can be found HERE

Part Six of this series can be found HERE

I hope you are enjoying reading these blogs as much as I am enjoying doing them.

I am certainly learning a lot along the way and I trust you are doing the same.

There is always a host of fantastic blogs, reviews, tips and tricks available for everyone on Bestforkodi.com. Be sure to visit the site regularly and take a look.

I have learnt so much from the site and all of the team. Please feel free to contact me on Twitter (@Grendel1905) or any of the team, we won’t bite, honest!

Anyway, the build really is progressing nicely, this blog should complete the first stage, and I have to say, I am beginning to impress myself!

I have all the main menu items sorted and the sub-menus pretty much how I want them. I’m not sure if I have settled on the final background images yet but we know they are easy to change.

At the end of the last blog I said we would take another quick look at favourites and also have a go at a couple of widgets, so here we go.

OK, so if you’re like me and keep throwing loads of things into the favourites folder for either reference or to use as links it can get a little confusing. I find that for example if you are adding a link form a Movies add-on to “Recently Added” this is all that will show in the favourites list.

So now I’m not sure which add-on this favourite goes to — is it Genesis or Movie Hut or Movies XK? it just says “Recently Added”.

I created a sub-menu link to my favourites folder.

Once this is launched you can then highlight the favourite in question and hit the menu key. This gives us the option to now rename it. So now we can give it a more bespoke name.

This makes things a whole lot easier down the line, believe me.

You may think this is not a problem as when we view the menu list it also displays an icon (as in the image below) but this is not always the case when we view the favourites folder from other locations, trust me.

Another great tool is an add-on called “Super Favourites” but that is a subject for a future blog.

OK, enough about favourites for now, let’s take a look at a few widgets. I will give you examples of two types of widget that can be used, I call them either “custom” or “fixed“.

Widgets are sometimes animated but often more visual links that we can make appear on the screen. They create another great way to have a shortcut to any particular item or feature.

Let’s look at a fixed widget first and go to SYSTEM, Skin Settings, Set up Aeon Nox Menu and select the main menu item on which we will add a fixed widget. I will choose my ADD-ONS main menu item.

Scroll across and then down to Select Widget.

Now we get a menu with lots of options. Choose Video Add-ons and click it.

That’s it!

If we now go back to the main menu and go to the ADD-ONS section we can see we have a widget !!!

This will automatically scroll through the items you have in your Video Add-ons library. If you put your mouse over the widget you will see it flips over and now gives you a list of the Video Add-ons which you can scroll through.

You also now get the full add-on description shown on the screen as well. The best bit now is that if you click on any of the items in the list on the right it will launch it straight from there.

How cool is that ??

Time for a Custom widget now and I will show you this with Genesis as this seems to be one of the easiest ways to start.

Same process as above but this time select Custom in the Widget menu.

We are now faced with a screen where we have to input the path to the widget we want to display.

As luck has it, the paths to many of the Genesis options are widely available and I will list some below, but for now lets’ set up a widget to the section in Genesis called “In Theatres“, this is generally the most recent releases.

Type in EXACTLY the following:

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=theaters

Once we click Done, we now have the option to create a name for this Widget. I will call mine “RECENTLY RELEASED“. Click done and that’s it again.

When we go to the Genesis main menu item now we should have a Widget showing us the latest movies available in Genesis. As with all widgets and depending on your internet speed, give them a few seconds to load.

Move the mouse over the widget and we get a list and more cool details. Once again, you can now play the movie direct form here.

Here is a list of other links to sections within the Genesis add-on.

Box Office

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=boxoffice

People Watching

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=trending

Popular

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=popular

Oscar Winners

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=oscars

IMDB Watchlist

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=imdbwatchlist

Trakt Watchlist

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=traktwatchlist

Trakt TV Collection

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=tvshows&url=traktcollection

Trakt Movies Collection

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=traktcollection

Trakt Progress

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=calendar&url=progress

Latest Movies Added

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movieWidget

Returning TV Shows

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=tvshows&url=active

In Theatres

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=theaters

Most Voted (most votes on IMDB)

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=movies&url=views

TV Shows Airing Today

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=tvshows&url=airing

Highly Rated TV Shows

plugin://plugin.video.genesis/?action=tvshows&url=rating

Creating your Own Kodi build Part Nine

There is so much that’s possible with Widgets, why don’t you just experiment and see what you can do.

Well, that about concludes the basics of Creating your own kodi build. Below are some screen shots of what my build looks like so far. My thanks go out to all of the team at Bestforkodi.com

However, I’m not going to stop there!

I plan to continue the series but now we will be looking at more advanced features regarding the “customization” of the build.