Creating your own Kodi build Part Six
Welcome to Creating your own Kodi build Part Six. 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
OK so I’ve been busy installing Add-ons to the build and now I’m ready to start linking them to the Main menu and sub menus.
Again, like the last blog I won’t go though every link but should do enough to learn how to do it. I can then go finish off the job.
I love the PHOENIX add-on and I have a main menu item dedicated to it. This seems like a great place to start.
Let’s just take a quick look inside the add-on and see what we have, as this may give us some idea on how to set up the menus.
The structure inside Phoenix lends itself perfectly to setting up some sub menus.
Incidentally, if you click on the three dots in the top left hand corner of the screen you will bring up a menu. This menu allows you to configure certain items about the current Add-on in use. One of these is the view, as you can see it is currently on “list“.
By clicking on it, I can change it to “icons” and the screen looks like this.
Just a case of preference really, some Add-ons have more options than others, it’s always worth a look.
The main menu item can go straight to this Phoenix home screen and the sub menu items can take us to each of the other sections inside.
So, first let’s link the main menu item to the home screen in Phoenix before creating and linking the sub menu items.
Let’s start at the “old faithful” SYSTEM, then Skin Settings, the Set up the Aeon Nox main menu.
Scroll down to Phoenix then across to Default select action. This will be where we tell kodi where to go when we click on the main menu item.
There are a few options to choose from but select Add-on.
Then Video Add-on
Then scroll down to the Add-on required, in this case Phoenix and click it.
We just want to create a link to the home page within Phoenix, so click on Create shortcut to here.
And that’s it, now when I click on the Phoenix main menu item it goes straight to Phoenix…Cool.
The only thing I found here was that when I created the Link to Phoenix, which worked great, I lost my colour change done to the main menu item. I don’t know why this happened but I quickly changed it back to orange.
OK, now for Sub-menus. Once again go through skin settings but this time once Phoenix is highlighted, click on Manage submenu.
Now we are faced with a new menu consisting of three columns. From the left, the first one is a list of the sub-menu items. There were a few items in here already that I didn’t want so, using the delete function in the middle column, I simply got rid of them.
The middle column is therefore a list of commands that can be executed upon the sub-menu item highlighted.
The third column gives a list of available options from the category selected by the top item “Type” in the middle column. By clicking on Type, this changes the options available in the third column. We will look at this in more detail shortly.
OK, so once any unwanted sub-menu items have been deleted, click on Type until the option “Common” is shown in the third column, now we can click on Add in the middle column. We are now ready to add a new sub-menu item.
Now click on Change action
We are now creating the link, similar to how we did it above for the main menu item.
Click on Add-on
Then Video Add-on
Scroll to and click on Phoenix
Now scroll to the section with Phoenix for the sub menu item. In this case Crusader88.
Once inside this, click on Create shortcut to here.
OK, so far, so good. Back in the sub-menu page, click on Set Label in the middle column. This is where we can now input the name for the sub-menu item.
This is where to type in the name. In this label we can use the same commands as we did for main menu items, so we can change colour etc. Here you will see I have not changed the colour but I have used the [B] command. This makes the text BOLD.
And there it is, beautiful.
I now did the same thing and added the other sub-menu items.
And it looks like this!
So that is all there is to it for setting up sub-menus, it’s just a case of working through each main menu item and setting it all up to the Add-ons on your system.
As we are on a roll, I will show you another way I found out to set up sub-menu items which can in some cases, be a bit quicker. I will use the example of setting up some of the links on my main menu item SERVICE. This is where I want to have some maintenance tools.
I start off by navigating to and launching the required Add-on. In this case it is the Xunity Maintenance tool.
Once inside, I navigate to the section that I am setting up a link for, and press the menu key. This is either on your remote or in my case I simply hit the letter “c” on my keyboard. This brings up a menu where I select Add to Favourites.
Repeat this for all of the options you wish to add shortcuts for. In my case I chose three items, Delete Cache, Packages and Logs. These are now all added to my Favourites.
I now navigate back through skin settings and to the sub menu set up for SERVICE.
Once here, delete any existing sub-menu items and click on Type in the middle column until Favourites are shown in the third column. Here we should see the items just added.
All that is needed now is to click on each of the items in the third column and they are added as sub-menu items.
I now select one more item for the sub-menu which is a shortcut to the Add-on Installer Add-on. This is done exactly as in the initial example above. A quick change to make the sub-menu text BOLD, and there we have it.
I link the main menu item for SERVICE to the home screen of the TVAddons Maintenance tool (but you know how to do that now).
I’m off to finish the job now. See you in the next blog where will be looking a bit more at Favourites and setting up a few Widgets… Sounds fun.
Any questions please contact me on Twitter @Grendel1905 or @Bestforkodi
Keep dabbling
