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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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.
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.
I was a long time Kodi user from back when it was called XBMC.
About 5 years ago I got tired of messing about with managing media, editing config files and installing addons. Moved to Emby first, and now I am on Jellyfin. No media management required, the backend server does it all for me and the front end is great, never gives me any problems and plays everything. I run the front end on multiple Nvidia Shields with no performance issues.
I’d manage your media better with movies and TV in separate parent folders and not all mixed together. When you setup Jellyfin, you point it at a folder and tell it what media type it is. Mixing up different media types in the same folder structure just makes things harder than they need to be for no gain.
Ok but Jellyfin is a web service. Not really suitable for a Home Theatre PC. If there was a frontend application that worked in a kiosk type way, then it would replace Kodi.
No, Jellyfin has a server backend which manages the media and serves it up to the client frontends which support most modern operating systems like Windows, Linux and Android. See https://jellyfin.org/ for details.
I’d ditch the HTPC, and go for an Android based media player like the Shield, no moving parts, no keyboard/mouse and rarely requires an update. Had a HTPC for many years and anytime I wanted to watch something I had to mess about with it first before it would play.
Kodi itself can act as a frontend for Jellyfin.
…and it’s unusably buggy in my experience.
That’s strange. I’m using the old Jellyfin addon (not the JellyCon), and so far only encountered one bug in total, which, if you are familiar with kodi addon ecosystem, is basically unheard of. And even that one is related to my non-standard manual configuration that allows me to use WebDAV instead SMB or NFS. It’s using the wrong type of escaping for certain special characters, which is understandable, because who in their right mind uses WebDAV?
So that one doesn’t talk to the Jellyfin process. It just understands the way Jellyfin organises things on disk. Right?
You then access the files via NFS, SMB or WebDav (the horror!)
Just checking I understand.
Sorry but it doesn’t sound like you know what you’re talking about. Jellyfin is a server. Sure you can use a web client but there are many others too
Yes jellyfin is a server, and the question asked was what to replace Kodi with. Kodi is a frontend. Jellyfin doesn’t solve the problem.
So recommend a client suitable for a dedicated HTPC? I’ve yet to find one, as the Kodi add-on for jellyfin is buggy in my experience.
Well if you want a windows pc app there’s this. There’s a list of official clients but it sounds like you already know it
To be fair I didn’t know that existed because I don’t use windows. I would expect it would be fine if I did. However, I use Linux.
Ok. I missed which sub I was in, sorry. There is a Linux desktop Jellyfin app but I haven’t used it myself. In my own case I am running Jellyfin on Linux. I use various clients, including web browser (laptop), Android and Roku (TV) and find it works really well. In the past I had tried with the ‘connect directly to the server’ route with XBMC (as Kodi was called then) and it never worked well, with similar issues those described in other comments.
Not really suitable for a Home Theatre PC
Not sure where you got that idea, but it’s absolutely what I use it for. That I can also watch content from multiple sources as well is part of the appeal. Plus no constant upsell like Kodi and Emby.
So how do you interact with the jellyfin server from your HTPC?
Using the native Jellyfin app available for Amazon’s fire tv stick.
Fire stick is not a HTPC
Why not? It’s a computer that displays tv? At 4k, 5.1 audio, that’s not too shabby, no?
I made a PC specifically for streaming video back before sticks were a thing, but it was expensive, noisy and not very good in comparison and I don’t miss it. What about a stick is inferior to what you’re talking about? Genuine question - educate me, please. What software, what hardware, why choose it over something else?
A few things for me:
- I had most of the parts to build a low power machine that’s passively cooled. No noise whilst watching video.
- I can have a locally stored library so don’t need a NAS running 24/7 elsewhere in the house supping power.
- I can have multiple things running on it like games as well as media giving me a PC gaming console (fans come on at that point).
- Never have to drive it through my phone or a tablet. It’s just on the TV remote. Ease of use is great.
- No money to Amazon, Google or similar companies that just want to data farm me.
Kodi works very well for me with a local library. Serving it from Jellyfin was a mess (Jellycon). I think primarily this is a Kodi problem as really it should support DLNA servers much much better, and then a add-on wouldn’t be needed.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Stremio, stopped using Kodi ever since.
I agree. You can visit this website if you’re interested: https://stremio-addons.netlify.app/
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
can’t go wrong with jellyfin + this way you help out by seeding if you go down the tracker route too
