I have a variety of video formats in my library. Files in AVI, MP4 and DivX seem to be recognized by the scanner and play nicely. But files in MKV are just ignored – although my old Popcorn hour has no problems with them. What do I need to do to enable Kodi to recognize and play these files?
Thanks.
Nothing. MKV should be handled without issue. If you are experiencing a problem with this then you should provide logs.
Since the scanner doesn’t even see these files but catalogs the files around them, I have no way to provide a ‘play’ log. Even if I go into the directory using ‘files’ the .mkv videos are just not there. But visible and playable to everything else. Any suggestions as to what I should provide?
Where are the files located? It’s starting to sound like a permissions issue.
Well, they are on a Linux-based NAS box. Group ‘everyone’ has read/execute and read permissions. Some of the mkv files also have ‘write’. There is another copy of the data on a windows server but I have had problems getting non-windows devices to connect.
I don’t know how this can’t be an issue with your file server. Share permissions and file permissions are not exactly the same thing. I think you should go and investigate there.
Matroska is a container, not a format.
It’s supported and if you experience problems we would need to see logs
Sam
A suggestion would be to try to copy one of those files to a USB pen, connect it to the box and try to play it directly. This way you should be able to ignore any network issues. If the box still can’t see it, then I would check under Windows which encoder was used by checking the properties of the file.
Good luck.
Funny thing. If I connect to the WDMyCloud with uPnP instead of a file share, I can see all the files. And the matroska container plays just fine. But I was unable to add files from that path to my library for some reason. So I am going to wipe the chip and reinstall from scratch, connecting via uPnp (universal plug and pray). What was even more interesting was that I use the Kodi app on my android tablet to drive and its content view was even more broken that what the Pi displayed directly.
As already said, kodi has zero issues with mkv containers and most video and audio codecs that might be used inside the MKV container.
The most likely issue is with file permissions on the Linux file server. If you are using CIFS/Samba, then the permissions for the sharing doesn’t often match what the file system permissions say. OTOH, if you use NFS, the native Unix/Linux file sharing protocol, then file and directory permissions work the same local or remote. NFS is less ideal for Windows clients, but for Unix/Linux/OSX clients, it is a little faster, less overhead, and doesn’t have many surprises. I’m a 25+ yr NFS fan, if that isn’t clear.
IMHO, UPnP should be avoided. It is a huge security risk. Do you really want any device inside your network to be allowed to open ports on their own? Ask any security person, they all say the same thing - upnp should be disabled. http://www.zdnet.com/article/homeland-security-disable-upnp-as-tens-of-millions-at-risk/
Wiping the system and starting over won’t help. It is just 1 directory that holds everything ~osmc/.kodi/ Just move that to a .osmc-old directory and restart kodi. A fresh ~/.osmc will be created. It is highly, highly, unlikely that you modified anything outside that directory by accident. It would have been intentional.
Android is seldom solid for video playback IME. Complex applications don’t usually work all that well on Android.
So, first we need to understand which sharing protocol is being used. The kodi.log file should have that info if it isn’t an OS-level NFS mount.