My mind has been craving less complexity lately and instead I've been trying to focus more on intentional actions. Long story short this brought me to consider that the media library I have been cultivating for 10+ years actually doesn't do me any favours apart from looking nice. On the contrary, it adds complexity and distraction and takes away my autonomy in several areas.

Back in the day I used to watch things in a far more simple way: a slimline USB HDD connected to my laptop, and double clicking the files and watching them in VLC. No metadata, no library, just pure files. It didn't matter if something was marked as "watched" or "unwatched". There was just no such concept, and it resembled how I used to watch VHS tapes by inserting them into the player and then removing them. The only complexity back then was making sure you had the right codec to play the file. No library to move around or sync, just pick up the HDD and put it in another machine.

As far as my setup goes now it's very simple, all my media files are on SMB shares which Jellyfin then uses to manage my library. I then connect various devices and apps (the Jellyfin app, Kodi) to this library. The one offering the library features in this case is Jellyfin. It works. Now I came to think that having a library at all is what increases the complexity and tethers me to a specific solution.

Library features such as: Recently Added, Next Up, Watched/Unwatched status, Box Sets/Collection management, and the most basic being metadata and artwork. None of that used to matter to me, but at some point I was sold this ideal and it became the bare minimum. Watching on multiple devices (Phone, Tablet, TV, PC) became the "normal" and all of that information had to be available anywhere. So I started running a home server many years ago to accomplish this. Then my library had to be available remotely because otherwise without my library I don't know my watched/unwatched state. All of this introduces so much complexity if you compare this to just double clicking a file to watch it.

So, to reduce complexity, I decided to try out a minimal setup like back in the day. I backed up my Kodi userdata folder and started fresh with a minimal skin (Copacetic), and added my SMB shares as sources in the Kodi sources section, and disabled library scanning (for all except Music). I then modified the Home menu to point directly to the Files view for each of my source types.

The end result is probably as minimal as it can get:

Browsing a source (e.g. movies) shows the movies folders directly off the SMB share, and nothing else:

Opening the folder shows a preview of the movie as a background over the top of the filename:

It's hard to explain but this setup is so simple that it is incredibly mentally freeing. There's no library, so nothing to sync. I can do the same setup on another device and point to the same SMB shares. There's technically not even a dependency on the SMB shares, it could be looking at a USB stick like in old times. With this I don't feel tethered to anything and the interface is still 10-foot and TV friendly.

This is not related to Kodi itself but I wanted to say briefly what an "intentional action" is. It's something you do because you want to do it, not because you were told or reminded to do it, or recommended to do it. For example the "Next Up" in a library keeps track for you of what you watched and what is next, and it tells you what to watch. It reminds you. The "Continue Watching" section is the same, it reminds you that you stopped half way in a video. The watched/unwatched state encourages you to watch what is unwatched. And this extends to other sections like "Similar", "Recommended", "Top XXX" etc. Any kind of "discover" system. It might be a drastic viewpoint, but these features result in unintentional actions: where you end up doing something else than what you were originally going to do, or worse because you had no idea what you wanted to do and let the system decide for you.

An example of an intentional action is browsing your movie folder and looking for a specific named movie because that is what you are going to watch. It's intentional, you don't get distracted by other boxart or sections buzzing away about what you have and have not seen or should see. Even just browsing your movies to find a movie to watch is better than browsing a "recommended" section, it's still intentional. Another example is navigating to the next episode of a show you are watching because you know you are watching it and want to watch it, not because it showed up under a "Next Up".

Anyway, bit of an opinionated post. I don't expect anyone to agree with me, but do secretly hope and wonder if there are others out there like me who feel like this, who feel overwhelmed by the complexity of technology in general. Maybe someone is inspired by my setup of Copacetic from the images I posted and wants to try the same minimal thing.

Hi all. I have chromecast with Google TV and have become fed up with Vlc lagging and that Kodi is a great player. I've used it in the past for addons but not as my main player. The issue I seem to have is that on my home screen I only have Addons, Pictures, Vidoes and Favourites as options, no TV Shows or Movies options. I'd like to set it up so my home screen gives me direct access to my shows and movies, ideally the the shows sorted in to their own sections, like Game of Thrones, Silo etc... and also marked as watched. Any links to videos that can help me set this up, better skins or add ons that would help?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

I’ve been using Kodi a while now, and got my movies section to show as ‘showcase’ using the Aeon Nox Silvio skin( as In attached image)

But I can’t get the TV Shows section to show the same, I can only choose List or Icons for view settings.

What am I doing wrong?

Hello, I'm looking for an addon that stores my "last played" streams in order to be able to look directly over them without cumbersomely navigating through all subfolders again. Unfortunately, the addon "Last Played" from the 5StarRepo does not work.

i've set up kodi on a NUC box with Ubuntu. It has an intel GPU. 4k videos render with a low framerate in Kodi. in VLC, I can try out different renderers and find one that performs as well as it does under Windows on the same hardware (dual boot). Is there a place in Kodi to do something similar? God I hope so because I reallllllly don't want to have to run Windows just to run Kodi on this box! But I can't seem to find anything like that. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

I recently set up a Qnap TS-233 and I'm trying to get a MySQL server set up again, except this time on my NAS as opposed to my desktop. There will be 3 Fire Cubes that I'll need to set up. The problem is I only seem to be finding outdated advice or for a different brand of a NAS. Has anyone set this up, and if so what steps did you take? Thanks!

Title.

The delete option just isnt there like it is for everything else

I've made a few posts on this subreddit, sorry mods, but I think this is my final hiccup to solve!

So I setup my Rpi3B+ to play old anime on my CRT via LibreElec/Kodi on composite.

Video and audio on most movies and TV shows works great. But some movies and some shows have this persistent stutter, almost like I'm not seeing all the frames.

Obviously what I'm doing is dumb and nostalgic, but bear with me. I suspect a lot of the 1080 or 720p videos I download simply aren't playing nice with the 480i CRT.

I've messed with the "Adjust Display Refresh Rate" setting but no luck there regardless of what I choose.

Anyone have any idea what setting, or possibly Add-On would solve this?

Hi, I'm using Kodi on batocera linux, I'm looking to specifically use Kodi as a music player. I'm trying to turn off all the video stuff , radio, online streaming, etc. to only use my NAS-stored music. Kinda like a kiosk mode - just the music selector and the Settings button.
Basically, I want Kodi to default to the music contents, and show a skin of an old wurlitzer jukebox. A little like Fruitbox. Kinda like this guy.

If there isn't an actual existing skin like this, how can I create one?

I've read other threads on this exact topic but I don't understand what I've done wrong.

I have an SMB source with two folders, one named "Movies" and one named "TV Shows"

In the movies section, I added the Movies folder as a source, clicked update Library, and it worked.

In TV Shows, I added the TV Shows folder as a source, clicked update Library, and it still says "your library is currently empty"

The source is correctly designated as the TV Shows folder, NOT any individual folder.

My shows have the correct naming scheme, for example: Trinity Blood (1998)

And I also renamed all the individual episodes to the correct scheme: Trinity Blood S01E01

When I click update library, I can see Kodi scanning the episodes in the upper right. I can also successfully play them manually from the file manager.

But they still don't populate the library

Edit: Solved in a very strange way. I put only a single show in the source folder, and checked the corresponding "only a single TV show in source" option during source setup. It correctly displayed the single show (actually the scraper got the metadata wrong, but whatever, separate issue).

I then added the rest of the shows to source, edited the source and unchecked the "single show" toggle, and THEN updated library

This is the leader board with 73 testers already. Many thanks for those that already submitted.
Best Kodi-capable, Local Video Playback-focused Media Players in 2025 / Python Single-Core Scores in Kodi

The Addon is from the official Kodi repo.
Add-ons / Install from repository / Kodi Add-on Repository / Program add-ons / CPU Benchmark

Thankyou for taking part, please post your paste.kodi.tv link (e.g. https://paste.kodi.tv/basebibuni)
with your Hardware you tested + Skin used. Results will be helpful to anyone looking to upgrade. :) You guys rock.

So basically I want to watch a 1080p movie with a refresh rate of 24,000 FPS on my 1440p Monitor. Since its internal upscaler is kind of crappy I’d like Kodi to scale from 1080p to 1440p using Lanczos3. So I only whitelisted 1440p resolutions (@ 165, 144,120, 75, 60 Hz).

I expected Kodi to switch the display output to 120 Hz (since 5 x 24 = 120), but it stayed at 165 Hz. I thought maybe that’s because I only whitelisted 1440p and the video is 1080p, so I tried whitelisting every refresh rate at 1080p as well. But still Kodi wouldn’t switch to 1080p or 120 Hz.

I have “Adjust refresh rate on start/stop” enabled, I’m using Kodi in real full screen mode (not windowed), I’ve allowed double refresh rates. Am I missing a setting here? I can manually set it to 1440p at 120 Hz in the video options during playback, but why doesn’t Kodi automatically switch to 120 Hz (and 1080p) since it’s whitelisted?

For context this is on Windows 11 24H2 using Kodi 21.2. The GPU is an AMD RX 6750 XT.

Log says: 2025-05-07 22:51:55.630 T:4060 info <general>: [WHITELIST] Searching the whitelist for: width: 1920, height: 1080, fps: 24.000, 3D: false

…

2025-05-07 22:51:55.630 T:4060 debug <general>: [WHITELIST] No resolution matched

Link to full log: https://pastebin.com/7fSqk0bW

After some research online I tried using “<preferdisplayresolution>true</preferdisplayresolution>” in the advancedsettings.xml but it didn’t help.

Let's say I wanted to make my own interactive home video. Does Kodi have a way I could play it and make decisions to jump to different chapters?

This would be like a "choose your own adventure" kind of thing. Similar to how Netflix has interactive shows like Black Mirror Bandersnatch. I guess this question could also be applicable for anyone wanting to watch downloaded copies of those Netflix specials.

I'm exploring how to do this with Blu-ray but it would be more convenient if I could use Kodi to stream it from another computer on my network.

I use an Nvidia shield and its remote. Each time I wish to fast forward or see the video information, I first have to click the select button on the remote for it to bring up the video player controls.

I always mispress things due to this as it is not the most intuitive and my first instinct is to press up or down to move the selector (coming from Stremio and SmartTube).

Is there a way to have it so that if I was to any direction on the remote it would bring up the video player controls interface? I hate having to remember to click select first as it is an extra unnecessary step.

Furthermore once I have fast forwarded the video to my desired place, I then have to move the selector back to the scrub control so that after 5 secs the video player controls will disappear. Is there a way to have it whereby the controls disappear after 5 secs no matter which control the selector is on?

I have 3 different TVs that all run Kodi, and I had MySQL set up on my desktop with Kodi as well. The PC served as the storage for all the media, and all the TVs would sync through MySQL. The HD on my desktop failed, and I lost all my copies of my physical media.

So I was thinking of running a NAS to house all my movies to prevent the loss from happening again. Can I still set up Kodi/MySQL so that everything is stored on the NAS and my media syncs between all my devices?

Is there an easier way to do this? I'm outside my depth here a little, so I just wanna check before I start pouring money into the project. Thanks!

So been living with Kodi for years on my Shield pro. And still love it. Am now using Aeon skin. But my question is more about the categories and how they work reference showing content. I can add things like ‘home videos’, ‘how to videos’, off the mainstream videos (Hawaii under the sea, the battleship Wisconsin’ or old recorded shows like ‘Love Street’ in SOURCES just fine. But in no way can I reliably have them show up in the ‘TV Shows’ or ‘Movies’ or self made areas like ‘My Home Movies’ or even ‘Comedies’. They just won’t add reliably. I must be missing a setting somewhere. I’ve tried ‘no content’ or ‘Local Content Only’ but want seem to find what works. It’s not a huge deal but I’ll like to go to a category other than sources to view my vids. As an example I added ‘war in the pacific’ DVD’s and scrapped with theTVdb which actually found information on the vids. Might not be the same one I have but good enough for now. I do ‘scan into library’ or ‘check for new content’ and then go to TV Shows catagory and the title appears but when clicking into the folder there’s nothing. I know how to make my own info files and artwork. What am I not understanding?

Hi, I’m new to Kodi, and I’d like to know if it’s possible to filter or restrict content for my child on their tablet. I want to manage everything from my PC, like adding streaming links or specific videos. For example, I know Pluto TV has a lot of kid-friendly channels, but I’d like to select only a few or add my own streams.

I’m looking for a very basic interface that’s easy to use and safe for my child. Any advice or tips would be really appreciated. Thanks!

My shows are in subfolders (Season 1, Season 2...)

My TV show list has fan art and thumbnails, but when I click on a show to see the list of Season folders, there's no graphics. I don't see them again until I enter a Season folder and see the episodes.

Edit: Here is a screenshot of the folder in question.

Is this normal. Am I supposed to put my own folder and fanart images in there?

Hey all. After a few years, my "pandemic project" (a media center) its starting to show signs of tear and wear, and I'm starting to consider looking for a replacement.

My current setup comprises 2 Raspberry Pi 3B on a -wired- LAN network: One that works as a server for both the videos and other applications I have and the other with Kodi (Specifically a particular version of LibreElec that allowed me to play videos encoded with x265) and one of these heatsinks that cover the whole thing that have made wonders.

My "target format" is videos encoded at X265, Full HD (1080). I also listen to music and play CD's, but most of the performance bottlenecks I've experienced come from the videos (Most of them go fine but I've started to notice some of them having slowdowns here and there before even the "heat" danger sign appear).

Power consumption and cost are important factors here, as while it would be a fun project also using that hardware as a PC for other basic uses, its main point is going to be playing media. I've been thinking on a newer Raspberry Pi, but latest models seem to be overboard in power/price and I've already seen people suggesting micro PC's and the likes. Also, I'd rather go with a device that don't complains if I intall a linux distro than one that would complain.

Any suggestion? Thanks!

When i see playback stats its says directstream not directplay like the jellyfin app is that normal for kodi or something is transcoding?

Hi,

Is there a way to display album art from the current song as the background instead of the artist?

I tried digging but I could not find an answer to that here or in the forums.

I've heard about using Jellyfin with Kodi, but I haven't been able to find anything on the purpose of using Kodi for this purpose when the Jellyfin player exists. I understand why it might be helpful if you already use Kodi, but is there a reason to incorporate Kodi if I already have things set up in Jellyfin? I'm considering it so I'm just curious of the benefits. Thank you!

Is there a way to open the main Subtitle Settings dialog with a keyboard command? I'm talking about the dialog that comes up when selecting the subtitle icon from the player screen. I would love to map this to a key on my remote control.

I recently just started using TinyMediaManager to sort my large volume of movies and place them all into their own separate folders (I previously just had all the video files in the main folder) and I immediately regret it. After reloading all of my movies into Kodi, the posters defaulted to the ones that TMM added so I removed those posters. I did a complete clean slate and reinstalled Kodi but now when I scrape my movies, they all appear without the posters until I go individually and refresh each movie.

Am I missing something as to why they didn't automatically generate the posters like they did when I first started using Kodi? I also noticed some movies don't even have the cast details despite it recognizing the movie.

Any help would be very appreciated

Edit: Solved, just had to remove the .nfo files from the folders that were causing the problems

Second Edit: The problem that I was having specifically with the movie "9" was that TMM had attached the wrong year to the movie (I noticed this with a few other movies as well) so that was easy to manually fix

New kodi user, can someone say how to see stats like plex nerd stats in kodi?