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?
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I used Kodi with LibreElec for years in a similar setup. It was nice… but in practice I didn’t really use the “cool” functionalities (like indexing, image preview, Web remote control, etc) so instead I checked how Kodi works and noticed DLNA. I saw that my favorite video player, namely VLC, supports DLNA. I then looking for DLNA server on Linux, found few and stuck to the simplest I found, namely minidlna. It’s quite basic, at the least the way I use it, but for my usage it’s enough :
- install VLC on clients, including Android video projector, phones, XR HMDs, etc
- install minidlna on server (RPi5)
- configure minidlna to serve the right directory with subdirectories ( /var/lib/minidlna by default )
- configure few extra software that get videos to push them (via scp script and ssh-key) to rpi5:/var/lib/minidlna/
voila… very reliable setup (been using for more than a year on a daily basis.