Kodi has been working fairly well for my collection of movies and TV shows. However, I am having trouble figuring out how to organize and catalogue my homemade videos.
I initially thought that the Videos menu would be for that. However, as I try to get my personal videos in the library, they end-up mixed with the Movies.
It gets more complicated because they do not even show under the Videos menu. Only way I could get relatively easy access to them was flagging them as Favourites. However, this is not a good long-term solution when I add many.
I created a dedicated folder and subfolders for them and manually created movie.inf files for each one, using the standard movie.inf files. However, Kodi keeps asking for a scrapper library during the source setup and will not work if I select “None”. I managed to overcome this one by selecting “Use Internal Sources Only” in the configuration.
However, I imagine that there is a more elegant solution for this.
Is there a better way to do it? The Movie and TV Shows are well documented. Even the Kodi Wiki does not say anything about how to deal with the Videos section.
That thread is 12 years old. I think it’s safe to say that might not be the best choice today. Here’s what I would do.
I would put all the home movies in a folder, then define the source as Movies but using the Local Information Only information source. This will keep Kodi from trying to use an external scraper. You should also turn OFF “Movies are in separate folders that match the movie title” so that you can have all the videos in the folder. If you want to have nested folders of home movies, turn on “Scan Recursively” (note that the folder hierarchy will not help you sort or group the movies in the actual Kodi GUI - more on that in a second).
For every movie, you then create an nfo file named the same as the movie. See:
And here’s the trick for having them in your Movies area but still somewhat separate from the rest of your movies. In the nfo file, make sure to include the SET tag, like this:
<set>
<name>Home Movies</name>
</set>
Once you scrape the new source, anything with that set name will be grouped together and shown in the movies section under “Home Movies.” You can’t nest sets, but you could have some different sets if you wanted to group them like “Home Movies - Kids” and “Home Movies - Vacations.”
You’ll see if the nfo information to which I linked that you can also give them a “sort” name (in case you don’t want to just sort them by the name of the video file).
I’m pretty sure selecting None tells Kodi there is no videos in there to scrape. You have to select a video type and select some kind of scraper (even local only).
Yeah I wasn’t sure if the OP meant “he doesn’t want to choose” or “he can’t choose none”.
For me for “home” movies I just have them organized in folders that I don’t scrape and just access via direct Menu entries. But yes if you want it tidy with pictures and everything then nfo (local info only scraper) is the way to go.
I’d like to recommend MediaElch to help you with creating NFO files for home videos. It’s a pretty good GUI for creating Collections, defining Genre’s, tagging, and just about everything else. You can enter in all your pertinent data like date, summary, who is in the video, etc… and the program will write the NFO in Kodi format for you. If you want to get fancy, you can even create fanart.
I have my all my videos set to local sources only since I am particular about what I want displayed. Some TV shows I put in production order which isn’t an option from most websites. The Dresden Files is a good example of this. Some executive shuffled the episode order thinking more action in the beginning would attract more viewers but it screws up the storyline.
I have a folder for Movies, TV Shows, and Misc. The Misc folder has the home videos and they are all tagged and in a collection. Easy to find that way.
Nope. When I chose “None” it simply did not do anything. I can chose “use only local sources” but it did not work as I intended. Meaning that the videos ended-up mixed-up with the movies.
Furthermore, they do not show under the “Videos” menu. They get mixed up with the Movies under the Movies section. Another weird thing is that the posters and fanarts do not show up. Kodi is reading the NFO files I created, but does not display the posters neither the fanart, which I created taking screenshots during the playback and saving as “poster.jpg” and “fanart.jpg” in the same folder as the videos.
I cannot chose “None”. Kodi simply ignores the video files.
So, I could only access those files by browsing the folders and subfolders if I try to access them through the Videos menu.
They show under the Movies menu, but without the associated posters and fanarts.
One workaround is tagging them as “Favourites” and accessing them via that Menu. However, this is not a good longterm solution.
I’ve been using TMM (tinymediamanager) to create the NFO files. TMM shows the posters and fanarts correctly. However, for some reason, Kodi does not show them. This issue is only happening with the home videos. The Movies have been working fine with Kodi loading the posters, fanarts, banners, etc. correctly.
Ah, if you are using TMM you are doing the same thing as I am. I do not know how you have your sources set up, but this is how mine is and it works without issue:
/Misc (holds nothing but home videos)
–/Home Video 01/
–/Home Video 01.mkv
–/Home Video 01.nfo
–/Home Video 01-poster.png
–/Home Video 02/
In Kodi, when configuring the source I have it configured as containing Movies. TV Shows & Music videos have different fields available to them and they also have different folder structure requirements. Metadata source Local scrape only.
In TinyMediaManager or MediaElch, you then set it up either via collections, genre, or tags. Refresh Kodi and that should take care of it.
If you open a non-parsing nfo file you will see it is in xml fomat with a bunch of tags that open and close around various bits of metadata. The “set” tag is one piece of optional data that you can include which outlines the name of a movie set.
I think the confusion here is that there is one method in which one purposely does not include some items in their library (the stuff that shows up under movies/TV in the main menu) and instead just goes to videos>files>[whatever folder they set to none]> and just selects their files to play from there.
First you must go to the movie set tab and then right click and select “add a movie set” and input your details. You would then go over to movies tab and find one of your home movies. When you double click on the movie name in the “details 2” tab there is a “movie set” box that you would select the movie set you created. Rinse and repeat for all items in this set. You would then need to go to Kodi and to videos>files> highlight your home movies source folder, context menu, and do a “change content” and in that dialog select “none”. When you press OK it should ask if you want to remove from library which you should choose yes. You would then go back on this same folder with a “set content” and set it up for movies and local only so it scrapes these items again but with the new information. Kodi will not automatically update existing library items just because a nfo was updated. You could alternatively push a refresh for each via TMM or in Kodi via the full screen information window, but this is a lot more work if your doing a lot of files.