Your kids want to watch something on your Kodi system, but you're not so keen on filling up your add-ons list with child-friendly channels. That's fine, because just as you can with popular services like Netflix, you can create profiles for your kids to keep their stuff separate.
The process for creating Kodi profiles is not immediately obvious because it's not exactly user-facing. But it's also not very difficult, as long as you know where to look.
For this guide, we're using Kodi 17 with the stock skin. If you're on a different build, things might be slightly different.
- Select the settings cog on your home screen.
- Click on the box labelled profile settings.
- Select add profile.
- Give your profile a name and hit OK.
Each profile set up on your Kodi system can now have its own individual settings and add-ons. You can set up the new profiles to transfer everything from the main profile, just select "yes" instead of "no" when you're given this option after creating a new one.
To switch between profiles you need to log off the current one. To do so, hit the power icon and select log off. You're then taken to a screen that presents all of your profiles, and it's as easy as selecting the one you want and going in to enjoy your content.
Kodi is already a terrific media center, but little touches like this one make it your media center.
Useful on the family Xbox One
Now that Kodi is available in alpha on the Xbox One the profiles features can be incredibly useful. If you're using Kodi to handle your family's media, profiles is a great way to keep everyone happy.
By setting up a profile for the kids, for example, you can separate their media from your own, and you won't need anything as drastic as separate Xbox profiles. The steps above still apply, albeit the user interface is a little different (it's just profiles not profile settings, for example).
Right now though, it seems if you set Kodi to allow you to pick a profile at boot it doesn't let you do anything at all. But it's still in alpha so it's expected to be buggy. Using it on the Xbox right now probably isn't recommended if it's something you're going to depend on, but it's going to be super useful when we get to a proper release.
Download Kodi from the Microsoft Store
Updated January 10, 2018: We added details on the current state of profiles on the Xbox One version of Kodi.
