Home video collection

  • Hello,

    I'm new to LibreELEC, and I can not find a way to create a separate movie database of my own video recordings. I would like to browse them with all the possibilities of the system, but do not want to mix them with movies.

    Basically I would like to have a separate database of these and a new main menu item below Movies with the name "Own recordings" or "Home videos" something like that.

    I see that I can add them as an additional source with local nfo scraping, even can mass create .nfos with a script, add them to a fixed <set>, but they will mix with other video content anyway. I have a lot of these, so I need the whole system to browse them comfortably, not only as a set of movies for example.

    What are the opportunities here? I can code anything, for example a new add-on if that's the only way, but I would be surprised if this use case isn't handled already.

    Thanks in advance.

  • Kodi has "a" library (singular) for movies so even if you code it's a non-trivial change to implement multiple databases. The default Estuary skin also does not support adding new items in the top-level navigation menu. However, it's possible to add your own shortcuts similar to "recently added" or "genres" under Movies using the "node editor" addon. Using this you could add a "Home Movies" item that displays content using specific metadata or source as the node filter criteria. I believe some skins also support adding additional navigation items, which might allow you to do similar things (or leverage the nodes you added) but on the top-level menu (but I only use Estuary so I forget the names of the ones that do allow that). Worst case, and if you wanted to stick with the default Estuary skin, you can clone/hack the skin to manually hardcode the items. You need to clone /usr/share/kodi/addons/skin.estuary to /storage/.kodi/addons/skin-estuary-mod and then change the skin name in addon.xml to skin.estuary-mod to avoid a namespace clash. Or if you're more build-system minded; create a diff patch of the change and then build your own LE image (which is easier than it sounds) to always have your changes pre-built.

  • Thank you for the detailed reply. I added them as music videos at the end. Works acceptable, I can browse them by year, by tags and so on.

    It is so interesting, that even very creative people create software only for consumer-minded people :)

    Great software by the way.