Native Mode Kodi Add-On

[KodiUser1138]

I'll give you an explanation of my set-up and it might possibly answer your question.

My media server is running Windows 10. All media drives are mapped to a folder created in a partition of the main SSD on the server. Each partition/folder is for a different purpose so they aren't large partitions as they are only used for network routing and not actually storing data. I have one partition with inbreeded folder for Movies, one for TV shows, one for Music, one for Soundtracks, One for AEW, one for general media and one for other (at this time) which has a drive mapped to it that has further sub-folders.

Now for my movies I don't have a giant RAID NAS set-up, rather just individual drives with alphabetical sorting of my movies that are full HD rips. On each drive I have folders for each letter contained, so right now I have a drive with Movies A and Movies B folders and then in each of those folders I have all A/B movies in their own sub folders using Kodi file naming conventions to properly show tags for media format, audio format, aspect ratio and a special one for Best Picture Oscar winners.

For TV Shows each hard drive has a main folder that is numbered so TV Shows 1, 2, 3 etc and then those folders have various TV shows in them with some specific sorting but nothing like the alphabetical I have for movies.

AEW is just another version of TV Shows.

Other has a hard drive with a few folders for other types of "movies" O don't sort into my main movie library, like stand-up and music concerts, documentaries and anything else I might add.

In Jellyfin libraries I just need to point to the main Movies or TV Shows folders on the specific partition drives and never need to think about where JF looks for specific data again. For the Other I go to each specific sub-folder.

Now over in Kodi I add my Movies, TV Shows, AEW, Documentaries, Concerts etc JF libraries in Native mode (on my LAN clients) and Kodi talks to JF and they do the rest. From that linked point Kodi gets all the specific path location for each entry from JF and then basically ignores JF when playing back by directly accessing the media through the LAN. It works flawlessly so far and I can even run add-ons like CinemaVision and the awesome but not properly supported VideoExtras.

I don't have any info in the Kodi client sources and haven't found a reason to need them at this point.

For any Kodi connections to my JF server from outside my LAN I have to use the add-on method and that works almost exactly the same way including being able to stream full MVC MKV Blu-ray with Atmos audio and have everything decode and playback properly. The only thing that doesn't work is the VideoExtras add-on because that uses direct paths with native mode.

All my new media updates happen on the JF server side and get pushed to Kodi with the only issue I've found being some artwork for TV shows not updating properly without doing a library "fix" which basically just deletes all the info for that library and re-syncs. Otherwise it's been working awesome for me for 2 years now and I couldn't imagine going back to manually updating so many Kodi clients with each new entry/change like I did for a decade. Now I also run a very custom Kodi skin that has 2 versions, one for LAN and one for outside clients, so unsure what stock/supported skin options might return for others.


Best advice I can give is to test things, see what works as you like and what doesn't, and always make back-ups as you go so if something breaks you can back-track.