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?
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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.
The directory is not organized, file names aren’t manually adjusted, and the movies and shows are mixed together
Disgusting
Just organize your library properly and pretty much every software will manage it better. There are options for organizing and renaming them mostly automatically, like EastTAG or filebot. Some people use Sonarr and Radarr to organize shows and movies, but those are probably overkill for you. The various *arrs will be more useful if you’re consuming new media through a server hosting Plex or Jellyfin. Kodi is also a waste if the library isn’t already meticulously organized and you don’t need a 10 foot interface.
If you’re only consuming on desktop and you insist on being disorganized, then why even bother with anything other than VLC? It runs on Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android.
People keep talking about needing to “organize your library” but what do you mean by that? Is metadata tagging sufficient? Or does Kodi care about filenames and directory structure?
Sonarr puts shows in
- show folder
- season folder
- show name - S01E01 - episode name.mp4
Wait, is this not standard practice?
I’ve always organized media files this way; I index my music similarly.
Which is why most people don’t even realize this is a requirement. Also lots of us come from a time before these fancy players, so we needed to sort things out this way in order to find what we wanted.
To me, having a library be just files thrown in a folder regardless of show/movie/etc seems very messy.
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.
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
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.
What desktop?
can’t go wrong with jellyfin + this way you help out by seeding if you go down the tracker route too
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.
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.
