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In the first couple of KODI Room articles, I focused on add-ons. It occurred to me that for this third issue it would be good to cover some of the basics, both of dealing with local KODI media, and getting the most out of all the content added to KODI.
Before you add movies, television shows, or music to KODI, it’s important to get the naming convention correct. The KODI wiki is the best place to consult for how to name your movies, television shows, or music videos. Movies generally follow the format of:
Movie name (date) DVD/Blueray.extension
For example:
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) DVD.mkv
Television shows are a bit tricky because there are a couple of requirements: first, all episodes for a particular show need to be in a subfolder named after the show, and, second, the names should follow the format:
Show name sXXeXX.extension
For example:
Rent a Goalie s02e05.mkv
In this example, the show is Rent a Goalie, season 2, episode 5. You can also organize files in subdirectories by year or season, but I like this method since it makes finding files simpler.
Music videos follow the format:
Artist - song.extension
For example:
ACDC - Thunderstruck.mp4
Music in mp3, flac, or other audio-only format, is a little bit different. All music files should have proper ID3 tags. If you’re not sure how to rip your CD collection, check out the Linux Labs article in Issue #114 of Full Circle Magazine. Back in Issue #88 you can also find information on how to rip DVDs with Handbrake.
Once you have your content sorted into directories, you’ll need to tell KODI where to look for the media and what type of media you’re adding. For movies, television shows and music videos, click the Videos menu option. Next, select Files and Add Videos. A new window opens up and you can either enter the path to the movies, television shows, or music videos directory, or you can browse your file system until you find the folder containing your media.
Just above the OK and Cancel button, KODI asks you to name the media source. In this example, I’ve named the folder Movies, but you can give it a more descriptive name, and you can have multiple sources for the same kind of content. At home, we use separate folders for Bluray and DVD content so we’ve added a couple of different sources with different names to help divide the content. We’ve also separated out DVDs we ripped a long time ago without subtitles from DVDs we’ve ripped recently with the subtitles by using separate folders and media source names.
Once you click OK, a new screen appears asking you to set the content type. From this menu, you will choose what type of content the folder contains. In the top left-hand side, click the arrows just under the text ‘This directory contains’. KODI will cycle through the following content types: none, music videos, TV shows, and movies.
To the right of This directory contains, you can choose the “scraper” to use. The way KODI gets information about a movie is to “scrape” it off a site. KODI comes with a select group of scrapers for each content type. In our screenshot, The Movie Database is the default for the movies content type, but others like IMDB are available. Some content types have more scrapers available that you can add by clicking the Get more option. Click the OK button. KODI will ask if you want to “refresh the information for all items within the path.” Click Yes so the scraper can scrape the movie information.
Depending on how many movies KODI has to scrape, it may take a few seconds to several minutes. Don’t worry too much about selecting the ‘Movies are in separate folders’ option, we’ve found KODI scrapes movies in named subdirectories regardless of whether this option is selected as long as ‘scan recursively’ is selected.
Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation where a movie shows up twice in your media library. There are a couple of reasons for this: sometimes you actually have the same movie saved twice with a slightly different name, sometimes you’ve removed a duplicate movie or renamed a movie and when it got scraped it added a second movie to the library, and sometimes you have duplicates because you’ve got a Bluray and DVD version. What we want to do is “clean” the library, so, the next time auto update runs (or you manually scrape content), all old content will be removed.
Click System > Video
Change the Settings Level at the bottom of the screen from Standard to Advanced. You can now scroll down the right-hand side until you see the Clean library option. Click Clean library and click Yes when prompted.
This tip won’t remove extra movies if you still have multiple files with the same name, but it fixes the duplicate scraped information from the library when you’ve deleted a file or changed a filename.
Everyone has run into them; movies or television shows where the audio suddenly dips to a below perceptible level. What’s worse… as we get older, most of us tend to have an even more difficult time hearing. Subtitles are a great way to see what sometimes can’t be heard. There are a couple of ways to enable subtitles. If you’ve ripped a Bluray or DVD with subtitles embedded, you can enable them by hitting the Enter key on a keyboard or clicking the OK button on your remote when your movie first starts. Next, click the symbol that looks like a square with a line at the bottom, a fly out menu appears where you can Enable or download a subtitle.
You won’t be able to download subtitles until you’ve set up a subtitle source in KODI. To set up a subtitle source:
Click System > Add ons > Install from repository > Subtitles
Then choose the source for the subtitles. For movies in English, we like Subscene.com. OpenSubtitles.org has recently shifted to require people to log-in before downloading subtitles. Once you have a subtitle source, you can use the same process, or clicking OK on the remote, while the media is playing – to download a subtitle. Sometimes downloaded subtitles are slightly off. You can try to fix this by selecting Subtitle Offset from the fly out menu that’s activated when you try to download or enable a subtitle.
The last tip for this month works whether you want to play local, network, or streaming Internet content. First find the movie, television show, music video, music or streaming content you want to play. On a keyboard, you can press the c key (for context menu), remote controls usually label this as Guide or Menu. A window appears. Choose Add to favourites to add the movie to a special favourites menu. On the default KODI skin, you can see your favourites by clicking on the Star on the bottom left of the screen, right beside the Exit/Power button. We like to favourite television shows because it lets you quickly access other episodes without sorting through your entire television show collection.
Got a KODI tip you think would be helpful, feel free to email tips to Full Circle Magazine: letters@fullcirclemagazine.org, or send them to me directly: chaslinux@gmail.com.