I have a WebDav server that contains some movies and shows. I use Infuse on Apple stuff and NOVA Video Player on Android to watch these. The directory is not organized, file names aren’t manually adjusted, and the movies and shows are mixed together. Yet, both of these programs are able to index recursively, get metadata, create a library and let me watch my media without issues.
Kodi, on the other hand, seems to be unable to index nested directories, requires you to tell it what type of media is in the individual directories and cannot identify anything correctly unless I go and manually rename directories/files. It also is exclusive for TV usage and not very suitable for desktop.
So, are there alternative programs to Kodi, ideally better suited to desktop usage or extensions I can install to make it work properly?
Kodi itself can act as a frontend for Jellyfin.
…and it’s unusably buggy in my experience.
That’s strange. I’m using the old Jellyfin addon (not the JellyCon), and so far only encountered one bug in total, which, if you are familiar with kodi addon ecosystem, is basically unheard of. And even that one is related to my non-standard manual configuration that allows me to use WebDAV instead SMB or NFS. It’s using the wrong type of escaping for certain special characters, which is understandable, because who in their right mind uses WebDAV?
So that one doesn’t talk to the Jellyfin process. It just understands the way Jellyfin organises things on disk. Right?
You then access the files via NFS, SMB or WebDav (the horror!)
Just checking I understand.
Yes. Jellyfin will index the media files and push all the metadata along with the file paths on the network share they both can see to the local kodi database. That way browsing the library on kodi does not suffer any additional latency, but you also lose some advanced jellyfin functionality like on the fly re-encoding.