Kodi is a great media player. It is much more than that, actually. It is a complete multimedia center, although by default it does not do much and that is why, despite being able to be used to consume "Caribbean" content, it is available in the Google Play and Microsoft Store. There is a problem with playing single videos, and that is that there is no "Open with..." type that would allow us to launch them directly with Kodi. If we are also using the flatpak version, it is even worse.
Flatpak packages, like snaps and in theory, are isolated. The Kodi flatpak It does not allow us to access all the files on our computer, limiting itself to the folders with multimedia content — Music, Images and Videos — in our personal folder. If we have a video in Downloads or on the Desktop, we will not be able to play it, and it will be necessary to move it to one of those folders or to the personal one, which also appears. This has an easy solution.
The command that gives access to the Kodi flatpak
Like almost everything in Linux, access can be granted with a simple command, the following:
sudo flatpak override --filesystem=home tv.kodi.Kodi
The above works at the time of writing. In the past you had to put in a longer path, but if you do this now you will see an error message that says “error: Unknown filesystem location, valid paths are: host, host-os, host-etc, home, xdg-*[/…], ~/dir, /dir«. The message gives us clues, such as what we can use instead of home: If we wish, we can also use host, something I don't see necessary. It is a possibility.
If we want to revert the changes, we will use this other command:
sudo flatpak override --reset tv.kodi.Kodi
With this we will return the flatpak pack of the famous multimedia player, which we remember that It is the only one that officially supports the project for months, to its original state.