How to Watch Videos from Local Storage with Kodi

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, or movies and TV shows you downloaded with Kodi. Playing videos from local storage has an advantage over online streaming, as you can play those videos offline. You won’t need to search for working links and won’t have any buffering issues.

Local storage

Organizing your videos is done with the Kodi library. This feature lets you browse your videos in a much friendlier and more visually appealing form. Kodi uses information providers like TMDB, TheTVDB and FilmAffiniy to fetch things like fanart, trailers, ratings and tags. Once you set up the library, Kodi does all the work automatically.

Here are the instructions on how to create your Kodi library:

  • Launch Kodi
  • Hover over Videos
  • Click Files
  • 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 creates a new library containing your videos with all the posters and the information about the videos.

Here how to update the content of the library:

Once you added videos to the local storage, you have to refresh the library to see the new content.

  • Hover over the library and click menu
  • Click Scan for new content

Now it is easy to watch the videos while enjoying an excellent user experience.

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