I have a WebDav server that contains some movies and shows. I use Infuse on Apple stuff and NOVA Video Player on Android to watch these. The directory is not organized, file names aren’t manually adjusted, and the movies and shows are mixed together. Yet, both of these programs are able to index recursively, get metadata, create a library and let me watch my media without issues.
Kodi, on the other hand, seems to be unable to index nested directories, requires you to tell it what type of media is in the individual directories and cannot identify anything correctly unless I go and manually rename directories/files. It also is exclusive for TV usage and not very suitable for desktop.
So, are there alternative programs to Kodi, ideally better suited to desktop usage or extensions I can install to make it work properly?
The directory is not organized, file names aren’t manually adjusted, and the movies and shows are mixed together
Disgusting
Is there a reason you don’t want the files organized? Id suggest using radarr or something else to organize them first.
As an alternative to kodi, jellyfin is great.
Kodi is a frontend.
Jellyfin is a server.
Jellyfin is not a replacement for Kodi. Jellyfin would replace OPs WebDAV server, but that’s not the question being asked.
kodi is best as a front-end for an already curated library. ive used it extensively since the xbmc days…
i use mediaelch to scrape, generate metadata files and rename files and folders into a standard way. it [can] generate things in a kodi-compatible format. kodi is set to just pull in that data. i concurrently use emby (jellyfin) to access that same metadata.
your problem is conflating the curation of your library with the applications that will use it.
kodi does need a full computer to run. thats where emby comes in. its for viewing the same shit on any other device
Thanks for the mediaelch tip !
your problem is conflating the curation of your library with the applications that will use it.
This is not some extremely hard job that’s way out of the scope of a media center. As I said, other platforms already have applications that can do this without breaking a sweat. I’ve never had to manually organize my files in years in any other platform.
i cant even imagine wanting a mess of stuff as you describe, or expecting some media app to manage that mess on the fly. but hey, if thats how you want it. good luck.
ive got 2500 movies and > 35,000 episodes in my library.
It’s not a mess on properly implemented clients but I also have a fraction of the media you have. I put new stuff in, they get indexed, I watch them, I delete them. I am not going to do extra work for the privilege of using Kodi 🤷
i do zero work for kodi. i curate a library i care about and that is not your end goal. kodi is definitely not for the ‘watch and delete’ crowd.
Well, that’s why I’m asking for alternatives but I also know a few people who rip a ton of blurays and throw them to a server and never curate it, and those are the only people self-hosting their media that I know anyway.
you seem to already have apps that do that stuff you want… i was more answering ‘how to make kodi work’
Not really, as those aren’t available on Linux directly. The ‘how to make kodi work’ bit is because my research didn’t give me any apps that can do this by default so I thought kodi might have extensions or forks I missed.
other platforms already have applications that can do this without breaking a sweat
Then go with those applications and that’s it. In the same vein, you can say that Kodi needs an organized library, so organize it and Kodi won’t break a sweat. That’s what a lot of people are telling you in this thread.
The directory is not organized, file names aren’t manually adjusted, and the movies and shows are mixed together.
Sounds like a nightmare for me
Stremio, stopped using Kodi ever since.
I agree. You can visit this website if you’re interested: https://stremio-addons.netlify.app/
I used Kodi with LibreElec for years in a similar setup. It was nice… but in practice I didn’t really use the “cool” functionalities (like indexing, image preview, Web remote control, etc) so instead I checked how Kodi works and noticed DLNA. I saw that my favorite video player, namely VLC, supports DLNA. I then looking for DLNA server on Linux, found few and stuck to the simplest I found, namely minidlna. It’s quite basic, at the least the way I use it, but for my usage it’s enough :
- install VLC on clients, including Android video projector, phones, XR HMDs, etc
- install minidlna on server (RPi5)
- configure minidlna to serve the right directory with subdirectories ( /var/lib/minidlna by default )
- configure few extra software that get videos to push them (via scp script and ssh-key) to rpi5:/var/lib/minidlna/
voila… very reliable setup (been using for more than a year on a daily basis.
Idk if this is actually a good idea, but I would try using a media server like mediatomb to index the files and serve them to Kodi. It’s been a while so I don’t remember if it was mediatomb that did the organization or not.
I use Jellyfin in conjunction with Kodi. Basically I only have Kodi as front-end, as it treats subtitles better than the Jellyfin client does. Works great.
Long time Kodi user, since it first came out on the original xbox.
Assuming you are a watch and delete person then for films you really do not need more that a seperate folder than you dump films AND only films into and make sure that the film name is correct AND it includes the accurate year for the film. Vast majority of downloads will already have this in place, I never have to bother to rename or move films about as they just go straight into my download folder that Kodi is looking for my watch and delete films. Older versions of Kodi used to be much more annoying for film scanning requiring proper spacing and so on. However its very very important that only films go into this directory otherwise it will fuck up if you start dumping TV programs into here.
TV is much more complex if Kodi is doing the metadata scanning as it normally relies on the top level folder name, and a proper season and episode numbering scheme. If you watching TV I would just switch to a managed downloader like sonarr, its a PITA to manually manage weekly show downloads anyway and sonarr will sort everything out for you.
The main alternatives to Kodi are Jellyfin and Plex but I suspect those will have the same problem if your library isn’t organized. How well are NOVA and Infuse handling your library? Like are they able to tell queue up the next episode of a TV show? Because Kodi is basically trying to be more like a local Netflix than “just a video player”.
Jellyfin and Plex are web-based so you’ll get a a far more consistent experience across devices than Kodi. But they’ll generally expect Movies to be in one folder, TV shows in another, and will have some expectations of the file name. They won’t open the file to figure out what movie it is.
The webdav server is on a pretty old device so I can’t host Jellyfin or Plex on it as it can’t handle decoding. The other two programs mentioned can index the library perfectly. They both identify TV series, break up the episodes into seasons, get metadata down to individual episodes and I don’t need to do anything manually.
Lol then why are you even bothering with Kodi?
Because Kodi client runs on a different machine?
You just want a desktop version of the apps you already have? Have you tried VLC?
The real answer is organize your library. There’s no reason to have it like that.
At least create two folders “Movies” and “TV Shows” or however you want to name them. Put movies in the movies sub-folder, ideally in named folders that match the name of the movie (so Movies/The Godfather (1972)/moviefile.mkv) and TV shows in the other folder again with a subfolder for each show with year included.
The best way to do this is to use a media manager when adding files. Something like mediaelch or tiny media manager and scrape your films and ideally tv shows as well and create local metadata for them that you save. Both can do renaming though tmm does it slightly better if you pay for the subscription version and it can automatically scrape and rename your library along with creating the relevant nfo files and things like posters so Kodi just works.
I guess you could try connecting Kodi to another service. If you’re okay running Plex on some other machine or Jellyfin you can connect Kodi to that if they scrape it all properly but most likely they’ll have issues as well because the only real solution is organizing your library. There are paid tools as I mention as well as free ones. Filebot is another paid tool that does organization and such.
What desktop?
None.
If somebody is using Kodi they’re probably running in a kiosk style. On my install I don’t even have XOrg or Wetland installed. Kodi is just running on kernel level graphics buffers (GBM).
I was asking the op what desktop environment they’re running, in response to their question
So, are there alternative programs to Kodi, ideally better suited to desktop usage or extensions I can install to make it work properly?
Kodi seems to be the wrong choice for what they want to do, but zeroing in on the right choice needs more information.
I was asking the op what desktop environment they’re running, in response to their question
…and I was informing you that, given they are looking for an alternative to Kodi, they may not be running a DE.
Oh you saw desktop like a desktop computer, I see now!
can’t go wrong with jellyfin + this way you help out by seeding if you go down the tracker route too
Is there a reason nobody is mentioning PLEX?
Because Jellyfin is FOSS and not corporate.
Thanks for the answer!
Plex is a taboo topic anymore because of their recent business-focused changes. I personally use Plex as I’ve been a user since the early 2000s with no intentions to learn the nuances of Jellyfin, and get my remote streamers moved over to it.
Plex mixed with Sonarr, Radarr and Overseer fits my needs perfectly.
Thanks for the answer!