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?
People keep talking about needing to “organize your library” but what do you mean by that? Is metadata tagging sufficient? Or does Kodi care about filenames and directory structure?
Sonarr puts shows in
Wait, is this not standard practice?
I’ve always organized media files this way; I index my music similarly.
Which is why most people don’t even realize this is a requirement. Also lots of us come from a time before these fancy players, so we needed to sort things out this way in order to find what we wanted.
To me, having a library be just files thrown in a folder regardless of show/movie/etc seems very messy.