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.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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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.
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
Is there a reason nobody is mentioning PLEX?
Because Jellyfin is free and not corporate.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If you're on Desktop just use VLC, or try running Nova in an Android VM. Most Linux users are the type to meticulously organize their files, so I wouldn't expect that there's an app that'll do what you're looking for. There are plenty that will help you rename/restructure your WebDAV though.
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.
Thanks for the mediaelch tip !
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.
What desktop?