Why does Kodi only show movies that have matches in TVDB? I want my home movies to show up automatically in the movies folder.

VulGerrity · January 16, 2023 at 11:51 PM

Is there a plug-in or add-on that will disable movie scrapping? Or rather, if a movie can't be matched by a scrapper, Kodi will just use the file name and pick a frame from the video to use as the thumbnail? I'm digitizing all of my old home movies and I want to put them on a standalone streaming box so I can just plug it into my parent's TV and they can watch all our old home movies easily.

I saw you can make your own nfo files for each movie, but is there a more automated way to accomplish this? It seems like a huge oversight that Kodi doesn't by default show all videos in a library, whether or not they match a movie in a database.

tokul · January 17, 2023 at 5:32 AM

Make your movie names match TMDB names and years.

Scapping forces you to organize your video library.

**chewitt** · January 17, 2023 at 7:22 AM

Kodi accesses media from "sources" and sources can be configured with different scraper settings. So you can have a source for commercial movies that uses the established conventions for filenames and online scraping and works with the TMDB scraper, and a separate source that uses the "local" file scraper only; that can reference local .nfo files and artwork created for each movie.

If you want personal movies to appear in a library view, the movie must be scraped to the library and that means the local file scraper requires a local .nfo file to scrape content from. Kodi itself will not auto-generate .nfo files but LE being Linux and thus scriptable (and with cron if the script needs to run repeatedly) it's not hard to script and automate creation of a basic .nfo files with minimal content. If there is no matching artwork for the local movie Kodi will grab a frame and show it, though the results can be a bit random.

The alternative is to access personal movies from the "Videos" menu. If you are accessing a source that has also been scraped to the Library Kodi shows the Library content overlaid, but otherwise it's just a raw view of files in folders and Kodi shows the filenames and a frame that has been extracted from the media file. This seems to be what you're looking for?

VulGerrity · January 17, 2023 at 5:25 PM

Thanks for the reply! Yes, I have found that I can view a list of the files if I go to the videos menu, select the thumb drive, navigate to the correct folder, and then can view a list of files and play from there, but that can be quite overwhelming and tedious for an elderly couple, lol. I'm looking for a fairly idiot proof solution. I'd like them to show up in the movies menu with thumbnails and a title.

It still seems like an oversight to not have an option to "Include Unmatched Videos In Library." By default Kodi should show all video files in the library with the option to exclude unmatched videos. Plex on the other hand will include anything you put in the library. It can be a little wonky sometimes for the same reasons (trying to find it in the TVDB database), but it does work.

I've probably got over a hundred videos tapes that are being digitized, do you have a resource on how to get started with scripting or the batch creation of nfo files for a personal media library?

VulGerrity · January 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM

Quote from tokul

Make your movie names match TMDB names and years.
Scapping forces you to organize your video library.

I'm trying to add my personal home movies, not commercial movies. I'm not going to name "Our Christmas 1995" as "Star Wars 1975."

tokul · January 18, 2023 at 4:26 AM

Code

for file in `find . -name *avi`; do 
 name=basename($file,'.avi')
  echo "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>\n<movie>\n    <title>$name</title>\n    <uniqueid type="home" default="true">$file</uniqueid>\n</movie>" > $name.nfo
done

add code to handle directory and spaces in filenames or put all your videos in one dir. Above code is just basic untested logic.

NFO files/Templates - Official Kodi Wiki

Based on Kodi wiki only title and uniqueid are required for movies.