UserData/advancedsettings.xml

The "advancedsettings.xml" file, which does not exist by default, may be created by a user in their "\UserData\" folder. Please consult your plaform specific FAQ for the appropriate location. This file can contain additional settings and pre-defined values for the settings available in the GUI (thus removing them from the GUI settings screens). "advancedsettings.xml" is useful for advanced/expert users and for installers.
 * NOTE! This file will not exist unless created by the end-user, meaning YOU!

The XBMC software will never write to this file, so any settings you define will not be overwritten by any XBMC GUI settings. So you can only edit this file manually on your computer, via a text-editor (like Notepad in Windows or a XML-editor). All the settings available outside of the GUI are documented on this page. NOTE: This file is CaSe SeNsItIvE and must contain the tag (see the layout section below), so make sure you use all lower-case tags or they will not be read properly by XBMC.

Layout
The layout of  is as follows:

where "setting" gives the name of the setting, and "value" gives it's value.

A list of the available "setting" strings and their values is given below.

The logging level that XBMC will use to log errors and information. Available values are: NOTE: As of r22142, loglevel also accepts a "hide" boolean attribute. Default value is true (old behavior), which hides the "enable debugging" guisetting. When false, the "enable debugging" guisetting will switch between min(loglevel, 0) and max(loglevel, 2) for off and on respectively. This is useful for chasing infrequent bugs where you may always want a debug text log, yet still be able to get at the on screen debug info without restarting the app. Example:
 * -1 No logging, suppresses all log output.
 * 0  Normal logging, only logging errors (Default)
 * 1  Debug logging.
 * 2  Debug logging with freemem, fps and cpu usage shown on screen.
 * 3  Debug logging with freemem, fps and cpu usage and full smb logging.

This amount of the loop filter to skip on h264 decoding. This can help the performance of slower machines when decoding h264 content. Values, in decreasing CPU usage (and decreasing quality) Example:
 * -16 None.
 * 0 Skip only empty frames (default)
 * 8 Skip non-reference frames (default on ATV)
 * 16 Skip bi-dir frames
 * 32 Skip all non-key frames
 * 48 Skip all frames.

The address of the online CDDb database. You may set this to another freedb mirror if there is a more suitable one. Defaults to freedb.freedb.org

Set to true if you have no DVD-ROM drive in your XBox, or if it's broken. Defaults to false.

Set to true if you have replaced the XBox DVD-ROM drive with a standard PC DVD-ROM. Expect performance to be somewhat variable. Defaults to false. removed for non XBox builds with r14123.

Set to true if you wish to detect joint ISO9660/UDF disks as UDF. Defaults to false.

Set to true to disable modchip detection. This is required for X2 chips to launch XBEs.

Set to false to disable CPU idle task (HLT) to prevent some machines from randomly shutting down. (from 3.5, r32955).

Set to the path on the XBox Harddisk that XBMC should use for when it caches files (such as when caching subtitles or for unzipping or unrarring). Defaults to Z:\

Set to false to disable virtual shares like plugin, last.fm or shoutcast sources. Defaults to true.

A list of additional file-extensions to allow (add) or exclude (remove) in the My Pictures window.

These are the current default extensions for PICTURES:

.png .jpg .jpeg .bmp .gif .ico .tif .tiff .tga .pcx .cbz .zip .cbr .rar .m3u

A list of additional file-extensions to allow (add) or exclude (remove) in the My Music windows.

These are the current default extensions for MUSIC: .nsv .m4a .flac .aac .strm .pls .rm .mpa .wav .wma .ogg .mp3 .mp2 .m3u .mod .amf .669 .dmf .dsm .far .gdm .imf .it .m15 .med .okt .s3m .stm .sfx .ult .uni .xm .sid .ac3 .dts .cue .aif .aiff .wpl .ape .mac .mpc .mp+ .mpp .shn .zip .rar .wv .nsf .spc .gym .adplug .adx .dsp .adp .ymf .ast .afc .hps .xsp

A list of additional file-extensions to allow (add) or exclude (remove) in the My Video windows.

These are the current default extensions for VIDEOS: .m4v .3gp .nsv .ts .ty .strm .rm .rmvb .m3u .ifo .mov .qt .divx .xvid .bivx .vob .nrg .img .iso .pva .wmv .asf .asx .ogm .m2v .avi .bin .dat .dvr-ms .mpg .mpeg .mp4 .mkv .avc .vp3 .svq3 .nuv .viv .dv .fli .flv .rar .001 .wpl .zip

Translation table for subtitle and audio names. Contains entries of the form

Allows you to specify additional tokens that will be ignored at the start of lines during sorting.

Contains a list "Regular Expressions" used by the File Stacking algorithm to combine multi-part files.

As of r24405 video stacking regular expressions must contain exactly four (4) capture expressions. Old one and three capture expressions are dropped (see log). More info on how the algorithm works is available here.

Default stacking:

If the argument action="append" or append="yes" is supplied, the default videostacking regular expressions will remain intact and the user specified ones will be added to the end. Example:

If the argument action="prepend" is supplied, the default videostacking regular expressions will remain intact and the user specified ones will be added to the beginning. Example:

If no argument is supplied, or the argument append="no" is supplied, the default videostacking regular expressions are overwritten by the user specified ones.

Contains a regular expression to match a year number in a string. The string found before will be used as basis string getting cleaned by the cleanstrings expressions. By default date formats like MM:YY are ignored.

Default expression:

Contains regular expressions to clean unwanted chars from filenames or folders.

Default expressions:

The "append" and "action" arguments described in the moviestacking section work the same for cleanstrings tags.

Contains "Regular Expression" syntax (commonly refered to as "RegEx" or "RegExp") to match the season and episode numbers in filenames. Text matching is compared case-insensitive.

Default stacking:

The "append" and "action" arguments described in the videostacking section work the same for tvshowmatching tags. Examples of matching regexps for certain filenames can be found on the TV_Shows page.

NOTE: for multi-episode matching to work, there needs to be a third set of parentheses on the end. This part is fed back into the regexp engine.

A discussion of pre-made regex lists to match common names can be found at http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=51614. These drastically improve XMBC's ability to match TV show names, at the risk of some additional false positives.


Contains regular expressions to match filenames or folders which should be excluded from a library scan (except tvshows). This can be for both Video or Audio sections of advancedsettings.xml.

Default excludes:

The "append" and "action" arguments described in the moviestacking section work the same for excludefromscan tags.

Contains regular expressions to match filenames or folders which should be excluded from a tvshow library scan.

Default excludes:

The "append" and "action" arguments described in the moviestacking section work the same for excludetvshowsfromscan tags.

Path substitutions for use with playlist loading. These are processed in order, and are useful for substituting an absolute path on a PC with a path suitable for XBMC to handle. Default is no path substitutions defined. An example is:

Use to force a backbuffer->frontbuffer swap while vsync is enabled. Set to the time (in ms) to allow for the swap (eg 1 is typical). It defaults off.

In the recent releases, playlists are treated as folders. Selecting a playlist no longer plays it, but opens it, as if it were a folder. Set to false to revert to the previous behavior. When you select a playlist, its content is added to the list of elements to be played. NOTE! This setting will not affect smart playlists, they will always show as folders.

The default number of retries if for example a source is offline is 100. With this control you can alter the number of consecutive failed items before a playlist fails.

The default timeout before item failure is 20 sec. It can be changed with this control

This controls how long the song information will remain onscreen when the song changes during visualisations. The valid range is "1" to "Indefinite (0)", in seconds. This does not include the duration of any transition effects. (The default is 10 seconds.)

The repeat delay for the Infrared remote control, in milliseconds. Length of time a remote button needs to be held before it will start repeating (ie continuously sending button pushes while it's held down). Defaults to 480.

Deadzone for controller thumb sticks. 0 indicates no deadzone at all. 1 indicates all deadzone (ie no movement will be detected). Defaults to 0.2

Xbox only. Set to 'true' to have XBMC display the Infrared Remote's button codes (OBC's) on screen when you press buttons. Useful for assigning functions to the buttons on a universal remote control. Defaults to false.

Size of the square in pixels that XBMC will use to cache thumbnail images. If the thumb is smaller than this size it will be cached as-is. If it is larger it will be scaled so that the number of pixels is less than a square of this value. Default is 512 (192 on xbox), which refers to 512x512 = 262144 (for XBox 192x192 = 36864) pixels in total. The thumbnail will be cached at using the same aspect ratio as the original image, using up to 262144 (for XBox 36864) pixels.

A list of additional files to try when searching for music thumbnail images. (The default is folder.jpg which can be removed.)

Contains filters to match music information (artist, title etc.) from a tagless music filename. The first to match completely is used. Matched items include:

%A - Artist %T - Title %B - Album %N - Track number %S - Part of set (disk number) %D - Duration %G - Genre %Y - Year %R - Rating

A list of additional files to try when searching for dvdrom thumbnail images. (The default is folder.jpg which can be removed.)

A list of additional files to try when searching for fanart images. (The defaults are fanart.jpg and fanart.png which can be removed.)

If you enable any masterlock settings below, they will be removed from UI. Code needs to be MD5'd, and you can use this site to hash it.

MPlayer postprocessing settings. This is unreliable, so they're available only via advancedsettings. Xbox only!.

Options specific to the Music Library

Options specific to the Video Library

default is false, if set to true, shows cache (X Y Z) partitions in the root directory listing

To avoid potential worries of plasma screen burn-in, you can set the Dim screensaver fade level to 0% here or in the Settings.

Set the delay in milliseconds before the busydialog pops up (default 2000).

Disable root overshooting aka evil B(tm) navigation. 'Evil B' navigation refers to the 'previous folder' action returning to the parent window from the root location of a media window. Sometimes a user would just want to repeatedly hit the B button to reach the root location without worrying of overshooting to the previous window. For this you should disable evil b by setting this value to false.

Static dns entries which take precedence over your dns server.

Starts XBMC in full screen (check resolutions!). The same as starting XBMC with -fs.

Provide a shell command XBMC will use to get CPU temperature. It should print out only "[temp as integer] [scale as one of "CcFf"]".

Provide a shell command XBMC will use to get GPU temperature. It should print out only "[temp as integer] [scale as one of "CcFf"]".

Problems with ghosting or videos which are only played back in the left upper quarter? The following ATI hack may solve it.

Added in r20809 (win32 only). Keeps XBMC always on top when windowed.

See the relevant How To.

Control the number of threads in the background info loader thread pool (thumb generagor, flagging, etc). Useful for tuning platforms that are low on CPU, like Xbox and Intel Atom based systems.

Commercial break detection not as good you think it could be? Are some commercial breaks in a series of adverts not being skipped? Are some parts being skipped that are clearly not commercials? Does the end of the previous recording still show? The following advanced settings can be used to better identify full commercial break sequences, remove incorrectly flagged commercial breaks, and have playback start at the actual beginning of the recording.

Not seeing all the recordings you expected in the Movies folder? If so, it's very likely that the electronic program guide (EPG) used by MythTV doesn't accurately distinguish between TV Shows and Movies all the time. The following setting allows the length of the recording to also be used to determine if a recording is a Movie.

When using "Sync playback to display" on windows, the detected refreshrate might be wrong. When enabling measurerefreshrate, the refreshrate is measured instead, which makes it more accurate.

Contains "Regular Expression" syntax (commonly refered to as "RegEx" or "RegExp") to match the localy stored trailers to movies in the library.

Note: This Option requires SVN Version r26733 or later

How to include GUI settings
You can also define the settings normally defined in the GUI in advancedsettings.xml. Any GUI based settings defined in advancedsettings.xml will override the GUI values, and the settings will be removed completely from the GUI (ie only alterable by editting advancedsettings.xml).

The easiest way to include a GUI setting is to first make sure it is set in the GUI to the value that you want, and then to open the UserData\guisettings.xml file and find the XML entry that corresponds to that setting.

Then just add that entry to the advancedsettings.xml file.

For instance, to set the Font Character Set for the GUI (found in the appearance setting, in the Look and Feel section), you'd open up guisettings.xml and find:

Simply take that entry and place it in advancedsettings.xml. The GUI entry for the character set will then no longer appear, and XBMC will always use the Hebrew (Windows) character set.

Here are some special cases, if they aren't defined the user will be prompted first time he/she tries to access any of these paths: Note: There are no default pre-set values