New Episodes on Kodi Home Screen with Arctic Zephyr / Exodus / Trakt

This tutorial will show you how to use the Arctic Zephyr skin on Kodi to show the latest episodes from your shows in Exodus according to your Trakt.tv lists.

Back when I used to use Genesis or SALTS, I primarily used Kodi by browsing the video library with the “library integration” feature that was available in those add-ons.  I even wrote tutorials on How to Merge Kodi Streaming Add-ons into the Video Library and how to Sync Genesis TV & Movie Libraries Across Multiple Kodi HTPCs.

However, these days, I’m using Exodus which doesn’t have library integration.  The developer of Exodus, lambda, left out the library integration feature on purpose because the tight integration with Trakt.tv is so much better.

I agree with the statement that Trakt.tv is better.  However, one feature that I missed by not having library integration was the ability to browse my favorite shows (from a streaming add-on) in the Kodi video library.

Now that I’m using Exodus, my video library is empty and useless.

Well, that doesn’t mean I can’t have an awesome Kodi home screen that dynamically pulls in new episodes from my favorite TV shows as configured in my Trakt.tv account.  Here’s a tutorial on how to do it.

Install the Arctic Zephyr Skin in Kodi

It’s in Kodi’s official repository, so you should find it in the “Get more” list when looking at the Skins in Settings > Interface > Skin.

There are some other Kodi skins that support the kind of feature I’m using, but my favorite one is Arctic Zephyr because it just looks so nice and clean and I love the layout of the home screen, especially the Spotlight widget feature we’ll use in this tutorial.

Configure Your Home Menu

Before we dig in to the fun stuff, you should clean up your home menu to only show the menus you want.

When you configure the skin, select “Customize Home Menu” to remove the menu links you don’t need.  Then, you might want to set one of your links to point directly to your subscription list page within Exodus.  Here are the screens you need to navigate through to find it.

Set The Source of the Spotlight Widget to Exodus New Episodes

Now let’s configure the home screen fallback widget.  When in Skin Settings, go to Home and select Fallback Widget.  Even if it’s already set to Spotlight, select it again.  Choose Spotlight in the popup.

Then, it will have you browse to the page within Kodi that it will use to feed the Spotlight Widget.

We’ll use the New Episodes page in Exodus which gets the most recently aired episodes from your favorite TV shows as configured by your Trakt.tv account.

It might also be a good idea to check the box to allow widget reloading in order to prevent the home screen from showing old information.

Enjoy a Beautiful Kodi Experience

If you go back to your home screen, you should see an awesome shelf of new episodes that looks something like this.

When you go up to select a show, an info panel appears above that showing the episode details.  Select it, and the video automatically starts playing (if you have Exodus’ autoplay setting on, that is).

FYI, to get that auto-play feature to work reliably, you should sign up for Real Debrid.  it will make your experience pretty flawless avoiding the dreaded dead links.

Also, another thing I recommend to anyone using Kodi to stream is a VPN service.  Read my post about the reasons why Kodi streamers need a VPN.

If you have any questions or comments about this tutorial, please feel free to leave them down below.  Thanks!