Error connecting Google drive on Kodi with Ipvanish

Kodi is a really great tool. It is one of those tools that has been around a long time and it does a really great job as a basic or even and advanced fancy looking media center software.

One of the recommendations that is often made by experts is that when using kodi you should always turn on a vpn to protect your browsing privacy. This makes sense and serves to protect you from the prying eyes of your local ISP. It also protects you from getting in trouble with any copyright owners who may be asking questions about your browsing activity. Not that I’m watching any illegal content, but in case you are. Though honestly, I think if they really, really wanted to get us, they could probably get us. But hey, if you gonna get got, why not make them at least work for it?

Yesterday I was reinstalling kodi on my fire stick. One of the must have addons that I love using is Google Drive on Kodi. It allows me to stream or access any files that I have sitting on my google drive or that have been shared with me by friends.

So as I went about setting things up, when I got to the google drive portion, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the linking up code to work. I knew I was doing everything right but it kept failing. After a few attempts I thought it was possible that I was on separate wifi at home. My router comes with a default wifi access and a 5G one. In the past being on either has caused issues with my networking. So I verified that they were both on the same one, but I still couldn’t get the code to work or match the PIN numbers provided.

Then as I kept scratching my head and wondering what the hell was going on, I had my “aha” moment! I realized that I had put my devices on the same network, but I turned on the vpn on the fire stick before running kodi. So though my fire stick is on the same physical internal wifi, the vpn was making me appear as though I was somewhere else. That’s why I couldn’t sync up the codes, my firestick was changing it’s network information to something else. Once I turned off IPvanish VPN during the setup process, it worked like a charm. The connection pins matched and I was able to authenticate and finishing setting up google drive on kodi.

I don’t know if this is a common issue people experience, but I thought I’d share this solution in case anyone comes across it. Well, if we learned one thing during this troubleshooting process, it was that IPvanish actually works and does what it says it going to do. They definitely make you appear on a different network.