Native Mode Kodi Add-On

[docsuess84]

In the instructions for using the Kodi add-on in Native Mode it discusses adding the sources in the file manager. How specific does that path need to be? Do I need to add a path for each specific folder of media type on each drive like I would if I was adding the sources within Kodi itself, or is a path to a hard drive that contains multiple folders as far as it needs to go?

[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.

[docsuess84]

Ok, I think I’m understanding this and it sounds like my setup could be far more simplified and streamlined than it is currently. Part of my problem is I was kind of figuring everything out as I went, adding storage when my existing storage maxed out and also going about it with an old school Kodi mentality. 

My media is stored on a WD MyCloud with a WD EasyStore drive plugged into the back. That drive and the USB drive plugged into it behaves like a standalone NAS with its own IP address with a dashboard and can be utilized as a Samba, NFS, or UPnP share. I organized my library within those drives by dividing them primarily by audience. Parent Movies, Kid Movies, Common Movies, Parent Shows, Kid Shows, that kind of thing. I added another WD USB drive that plugged into one of my Kodi clients which made it accessible to the other Kodi clients. The problem was I would end up with sources needing to have multiple network paths in order to include all the media spread across different locations. “Parent Movies” was really three discrete paths to three different drives and I wasn’t doing it with the fstab file or anything, so it’s super clunky. I had a MySQL (MariaDB technically I guess) and that was cool when it worked. The thought of being able to manage my library in one spot across multiple Kodi devices with the added benefit of accessing it with non Kodi clients like iOS devices sounded amazing, especially with being able to tweek stuff without affecting the backend itself. The original plan was to put Ubuntu Server on some single board dedicated device and just do it that way, but I ended up getting an older Mac Mini and using that as the host instead with Lubuntu because I wasn’t quite ready for a headless set up yet. Now I have the WD MyBook USB drive, the internal HDD drive of the Mini, the WD MyCloud NAS drive, and drive daisy chained to it all mounted via CIFs in the fstab file. It works. I was able to add everything to the Jellyfin server, but I feel like I have all these redundant samba paths and it seems overly complicated. If I’m understanding what you’re describing, I could partition part of the SDD of the host machine and use that partition exclusively as a  preconfigured path to all the different drives for different categories of media to simplify the whole thing?

Also just to make sure I’m understanding the Kodi part, when Jellyfin itself is dialed, I click add source in Kodi as usual, enter my path to the files via SMB/NFS or whatever, and then do I still select what kind of media it is? Does Jellyfin just override the scraper aspect?

[KodiUser1138]

IF all the drives containing your bedia are individual then yes you can use the small partition drives as mounting folders and set up things that way.

I'd suggest simplifying your media management to making the paths simple to follow on the network. Once that is sorted then pointing JF to the main folder for each is fairly simple and then that gets pushed out to Kodi.

For all your parent/kids stuff is similar to my Movies/concerts and TV shows/AEW. TV shows and AEW are seperate libraries in JF and then in Kodi and handled in different ways (partly due to custom skinning). For each I have a partition on my main server SSD with a folder that the elsewhere networked drives for each mount to. In JF I only have 1 TV Shows network folder but that folder has 11 hard drives mapped to it which each contain folders for individual TV shows.

I have one JF network folder for AEW and that in turn has 1 hard drive mapped to it which holds folders for each AEW show.

They key for me is separating things to different physical hard drives, not using RAID storage. I don't need redundancy (offsite back-ups) so all JF sees is one network folder per library (usually) and on the back end I can add and remove sub folders/mounted drives there. And then JF just pushes each library to Kodi easy peasy.

Everyone will do things different and part of it is figuring out what works for your setrup, future expansion, and work flow in adding/editing media. I'm at the point where I've got mine working awesome and just running out of physical space on drives and places to add new ones!