Adventures with Kodi

I have started playing around with Kodi again. Having recently turned-off my original external Jellyfin server, I have been running the server on my laptop. It’s been working well but I started to question if continuing to have this particular setup was worth the hassle.

The Jellyfin client on the Android box is just a client for the server, meaning that I cannot connect the local storage to it; all the media files needs to reside on the server. Since my setup is running the server on my laptop, I need to have the laptop powered on, which then serves the TV client.

There have been some hiccups. My laptop was turned off for two days last week, and I faced a connection issue one evening when I wanted to watch something. First, the TV client could not connect to the server when I fired up everything. Yes, I checked the server was running. I even tried to remove the server connection from the client and re-add it but there was total refusal. The only way I could get the client connected again was to uninstall it from the TV, reinstall it and reconnect the server. Weird.

I can understand that it is preferable for the server to be “always on” but come on, that was silly. Especially when it happened again the next day.

Rather than trying to troubleshoot this one, it started me thinking again about Kodi. I had last played with Kodi many years ago and I never really liked it, but I thought, let me see what has changed. I really like the Jellyfin client’s layout, the ease of setup and usage, and to me, Kodi has never really managed to contend with this. It still doesn’t, at least not with the default skin.

And this has always been the problem with Kodi for me. It is a powerhouse but there are too many settings and too many missing settings, particularly on the library side and the home page side.

Taming Kodi

My understanding of Kodi has always been that we need to install add ons in order to get things looking and behaving the way we want. And that’s still somewhat true.

For example, I don’t care about “in progress” and all the other categories it shows like “recently added” and “unwatched”. Thankfully, there is a way to turn them off completely now. But when it comes to wanting to remove some of the other so-called library nodes, you need an add on. Things like this should really ship as standard, and that has always annoyed me about Kodi. In the default theme Estuary, I quickly hit its limits, so I then went for another skin, FTV.

That was when things started to go well. The FTV skin is decent-looking enough and it keeps out of your way when you are navigating your collection. It has many tweaks for the home page and I have managed to get it looking exactly the way I like it: nice and simple. I want to see only Movies and TV Shows in there and getting that setup was easy.

I had initially succumbed to the add ons by installing Library Node Editor and Library Watchdog but that was when I was playing around in Estuary. For FTV, I don’t need them. Library Watchdog was useful but I have since figured out that it is easier to delete watched items from Kodi’s library and allow it to also delete the disc file. For new additions, Kodi seems to be handling these well (for now) although it sometimes needs a kick to update the library. I am going to keep an eye on this one for a while and I can always reinstall Library Watchdog if it starts playing up.

I have been thoroughly spoilt by Jellyfin’s beautiful layout. But Kodi’s ability to access the local storage was the decider for me. I just want something that works well for my needs and this might be it.