UPDATE: 2016-01-05 Advanced Launcher has been discontinued by its author and all links to its repository have been deleted. I am investigating alternatives and will post again once I have an answer. Until then, please check the comments section for further information.
Advanced Launcher is an add-on for Kodi that is used to launch external applications such as Firefox or Steam in any operating system. Launcher parameters are customisable so a particular instance can launch a specific website, game, or media file. In short, if it can be defined in a command-line interface, it can be done through Advanced Launcher.
Unfortunately, such awesome power is not available to Kodi users by default. To install Advanced Launcher, you will have to add the Angelscry repository to Kodi’s source list. To access the source list, navigate to the “Files Manager” under the “System” menu.
Choose “Add Source” and type http://www.gwenael.org/Repository as the path. Name the source “Angelscry Repository” and click “OK”.
From the Settings>Add-ons Menu, choose “Install from zip file”. When the browser appears, select “Angelscry Repository” from the list and wait for it to connect to the server.
Select “repository.angelscry.xbmc-plugins” from the list and choose the latest version of the repository to install. Back out to the Add-ons menu and now choose “Get Add-ons”. Select the newly-available Angelscry Repository, then “Program Add-ons”, and finally “Advanced Launcher”. The add-on will now be available from the “Programs” menu on the home screen.
Creating a standalone launcher (for a single executable like Firefox) is a simple process of browsing to the executable for the application (or just entering the command in Linux), defining the command-line parameters, and providing a (optional) thumbnail. The add-on walks you through the process and you will be able to set these launchers as favourites or (in the case of the Aeon MQ5 skin) home menu items.
The repo source is .net not .org.
doesn’t work….
Looks like the whole project has moved over to GitHub, which arguably makes finding it a bit easier!
https://github.com/Angelscry/plugin.program.advanced.launcher
Just download the master.zip from GitHub and install via the “Install from Zip” dialog in the Kodi add-ons menu!
And now that’s gone too..
Something strange is going on, if you’re not already a mile ahead of me: Angelscry pulled his website and deleted the Github repository for reasons presently unknown. A couple of good Samaritans have dumped the source code for development (with permission, apparently), and there is an older version hosted on Sourceforge, but I can not confirm anything is working at present.
https://github.com/edwtjo/advanced-launcher
https://github.com/lollo78/plugin.program.advanced.launcher
http://sourceforge.net/projects/advlauncher/
I’ll look into the options available at present and post again when I know something. Meanwhile, if you can confirm any of these leads, please let us all know! Thanks!
First link that “Atari” posted is good for amazon fire tv and second link is good for windows i just installed on both.
Anyone achieved to install advanced launcher on kodi 15 ? I tried to install zip file downloaded from github but I received an incorrect structure extension.
Thank you !
I am yet to find instruction on how to use it to launch program in Linux. And can someone reimplement it cause it’s a very good add-on. Wish I can code.
You should be able to simply define the executable when you set up the launcher. Point it to the executable file, the shell script, or command you wish to run as if you were invoking it from the terminal.
Meanwhile, it looks like there are alternative sources for the add-on (SuperRepo, et al), and Team Kodi has been implementing some launcher functionality into the Kodi core. As for learning to code, it just takes practice! There are lots of resources and online classes for little to no money that will teach you–it’s not rocket surgery!
Thank you for your explanation.I ‘ve got it pretty much working on OpenElec on my rpi with games, but my goal is to get it working with a browser like firefox. I tried like you explain, to set it up as a standalone launcher, but I don’t know which Firefox version I can use for this. I tried the portable version, but that does not work. II also tried to point at chromium in the root/storage/bin and I tried to launch firefox from within some emulaters. I would very much appreciate if you could explain which version and executable from Firefox I need or how to learn to create a “firefox rom”. Thank you very much, Ang
You should just be able to invoke
firefox [parameters]as the launcher command and it should run. That’s always worked for me.I should also note that Advanced Launcher is deprecated and many of the features are rolled into other add-ons (such as SuperFavorites) or Kodi core. Don’t know about OpenELEC, though.