Disable the seek bar popup (OSD) in Kodi / OpenELEC / LibreELEC

Inspired by this forum post, and other fragmentary how-to’s floating around the internet.

If using Kodi to run videos in a loop for public display, you will run into an annoying quirk: A seek bar overlay (OSD) will pop up for a few seconds whenever a video starts, pauses, or loops. For public kiosks and digital decorations, this can really ruin the mood.

The default Kodi skin “Estuary” does not have a native way to disable this behavior, but there are two workarounds available:

1. Under Add-ons > Download > Look and Feel, search for alternate skins which allow you to disable the OSD
2. Edit or clone the default skin, and modify it to remove the OSD

We will cover option #2, using Kodi 18 on LibreELEC as an example. SSH/Linux commands are shown below, but much of this can be done over a network share via text editors and drag-and-drop.

 Step 1: Locate the files on your Kodi installation’s filesystem

This varies based on how Kodi is installed, so I will try to catch some common scenarios.

• Kodi 18+ on LibreELEC:
• Access files using the built-in network share, or command-line via Putth/SSH.
• Original addons: /usr/share/kodi/addons/
• Extra addons: /storage/.kodi/addons/
• Kodi 18+ installed on Windows
• Original addons: C:\Program Files\Kodi\addons\
• Extra addons: C:\Users\your_user\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\

Step 2: Make a copy of the default skin

Using the above locations as a reference, go into the “Original” addons folder, and make a copy of the skin.estuary folder into the “Extra” addons folder. Give the copy a different name, i.e. skin.estuary_no_osd

cp -r /usr/share/kodi/addons/skin.estuary /storage/.kodi/addons/skin.estuary_no_osd

Step 3: Change your new skin to remove OSD settings

Go into your new skin folder under the “Extra addons” location, and edit the skin’s addon.xml file with a text editor. Change the addon id and name to be unique.

<addon id="skin.estuary_no_osd" version="2.0.27" name="Estuary_no_osd" provider-name="phil65, Ichabod Fletchman">

Lastly, from your new skin’s folder, go into the xml\ subfolder, and edit the file DialogSeekbar.xml in a text editor.

vi /storage/.kodi/addons/skin.estuary_no_osd/xml/DialogSeekBar.xml

With the file open, locate the section at the top called ****, with various actions separated by pipes | . Remove any actions where you do NOT want the OSD to appear. For example, to hide the OSD on play or pause, remove the following items:

Player.DisplayAfterSeek | [Player.Paused + !Player.Caching] |

When removing, ensure that there is still a pipe separating each action item. Save the file, then restart Kodi or reboot your device.

Step 4: Enable the skin in Kodi

After restarting Kodi or rebooting your device, go to Add-ons > My add-ons > Look and feel > Skin . You should see your new skin alongside the original. It is currently disabled, because Kodi thinks it is an unverified third-party skin. Click on the skin to see properties, then click the “Enable” button followed by the “Use” button.

Now pick a video and test it out! When the video starts, or when you pause and resume, the OSD should no longer appear.