u/Chemical-Agency-3997

If you've ever built home rows by hand, you know the drill. Into the skin settings, Add widget, Video add-ons → TMDb Helper → Movies → … then back out and try POV → Movies → … instead, because you can't see what a folder actually contains until it's on your home screen. Half of them turn out empty, or slow, or not quite what you wanted, so you go back in with the remote and do it all again. Then again for the next profile.

That was me every time something needed changing on our Shield, so I built two tools. Both are free and MIT-licensed.

Kodi Manager: https://github.com/glasgowm148/kodi-manager

A Kodi add-on that puts your whole setup in a browser on your phone or laptop:

• Status page: what's playing, free memory, whether debrid/Trakt/TMDb are responding, failing home rows and the last backup, with 7-day graphs
• Every add-on's settings in one searchable list. Search "torbox" to find it everywhere, and paste tokens from your phone
• Playback chain: which skin, helper and player your clicks actually go through
• Backups: automatic before every change, plus checkpoints and one-click undo
• Logs and a shareable debug report with your tokens stripped out
• Optional cached home rows with "View more", and a layout editor for Bingie

It's local-network only, token-protected, has no telemetry, and is read-only until you turn on writes. Install the zip from Releases and turn on "Allow LAN access".

nvidia-MCP: https://github.com/glasgowm148/nvidia-MCP

This is the one that changed how I run the TV. It's an MCP server that gives an AI assistant (Claude Desktop, Codex, etc.) proper access to the Shield and Kodi. I describe what I want and it does the work. So far it has:

• Gone through my add-ons and picked better home rows, then rebuilt the home screen around them
• Made Trakt lists for the rows, including a UK "what's everyone watching" list that updates itself every day
• Set up a separate Kids profile, then split out all the kids' viewing and moved their watch history across
• Tracked down and fixed a memory issue, a profile-switching bug and a Kodi 22 exit hang
• Merged all my watchlists into one
• Added a bunch of customisations so things work exactly as I want them to

All of that happened without me touching the remote. Before changing anything it shows exactly what it'll do, backs up, and can undo it. It refuses anything disruptive while something is playing or paused, so it won't restart Kodi mid-film. It starts read-only; write tools stay off until you enable them.

Will it work on my setup?

• Kodi Manager: any device on Kodi 19+ should work (Fire TV, Android boxes, LibreELEC, PC). But I've only used it day to day on a Shield with Kodi 22, so back up first and let me know. Most of it is skin-independent. The layout editor only switches on for an unmodified Bingie 2.0.2 + Skin Shortcuts 2.0.3.
• nvidia-MCP: built and tested on the Shield. The Kodi side should work elsewhere, and other Android TV boxes might partly work over ADB. It needs a computer on the same network with Python 3.11+. Kodi Manager is optional; it adds the Bingie layout tools.

Both are prerelease, so expect rough edges. Bug reports and PRs are welcome.

I've been using it on xhigh, but given the AA Score it seems high might be the most practical cost-per-intelligence ratio.

Certainly seems very capable, much more so than 6-SOL, not Astra level, but better than 5.6/6 - has made a few dumb mistakes and regressions I need to manually correct but otherwise happy with the level of depth it goes into.

On hard-long tasks it feels a lot slower though, maybe poor prompting on my part but I'd struggle to get Astra to work for more than 20-30min on anything, whereas 6 will easily spend 1hr+

Used up the last 9% of my usage since launch, and just used my bank reset. If I can get a full weeks use out of it I'd be very happy with this model, but I think that'll be a stretch as I've only really been doing one task at a time atm, not had it spawning agents, etc.

(edit: less than 4 hours into my reset I've used 14%, which is what I should be using daily if I want it to last all week)

I'm on the 5x Pro plan and the things I've tested it on are mostly genealogical research and presenting the info in an associated live website. Using it within Codex with the mac-mcp tool. YMMV