Kodi is well known for its add-ons that allow watching movies and TV shows online, but you can also watch them from your local storage. The definition of local storage is broad. It can be a USB flash drive, DVD, local network, hard disk drive, or movies and TV shows you downloaded with Kodi. Playing videos from local storage is advantageous over online streaming, as you can play them offline. This way you won’t need to search for working links and won’t have any buffering issues.
Kodi library allows you to organize your videos and browse them in a much friendlier and more visually appealing form. It uses information providers or scrapers to fetch metadata like posters, fanart, trailers, ratings, plots, genres, release dates and more. Once you set up the library, Kodi will do the work automatically. This means fetching and downloading all the information to provide a much better user experience while viewing your content.
Here are the instructions on how to create your Kodi library:
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- Launch Kodi
- Click Movies
- Click Add videos…
- Click Browse
- Choose the directory containing your video files, enter a name for this media source, and click OK. It will open the Set content menu.
- Click This directory contains. You can choose between Movies, TV shows and Music videos.
- Click Choose information provider and choose the suitable information provider
- Click Settings. The parameters under this section determine the look of your library. Choose what fits best for you.
- Enable Scan recursively if your directory contains sub-directories.
- Click OK
- Click Yes to refresh information for all the items within the path
Once the refresh is completed, Kodi generates a new library containing your videos including all the metadata about the videos.
Recommended scrapers
When choosing your information provider, you can choose from the list or add additional providers by clicking Get more… and choosing a provider.
Recommend movies scrapers
- The Movie Database Python
- The TVDB v4 (Movies)
- Universal Movie Scraper
Recommended TV shows scrapers
- The TVDB v4
- TMDB TV shows
Here how to update the content of the library:
Once you add videos to the local storage, you should refresh the library to see the new content.
- Hover over the library and click the menu button
- Click Scan for new content
Now, it is easy to watch videos while enjoying an excellent user experience.
