[MaxArk68]

First off, my apologies if this post isn't in the most appropriate forum.

I am not having a problem per se with Kodi, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, but not what I want it to do. Kodi is an amazingly feature rich application with a huge learning curve. Much of it quite advanced for the newbie and even novice at times.

I am accessing my home video files on my PC through Kodi. They are all uniquely named. When these files are being added, Kodi insists on scanning them to match them up in the movie database. But clearly the movie database isn't going to have information pretaining to my home video of my son's graduation and as a result is assigning irrelevant cover art and information to that file. In fact, inthe case of my son's graduation it picked out some 1935 war movie LOL.

Questions:

1) How can I stop Kodi from insisting on matching personal video files to content in the reference database?
2) I think its cool that Kodi so attractively displays movies, music and TV programs with all that information and cover art. How does it do this? What is it called? (so I can Google it). I think it would be great if I could make a custom database with custom cover art etc for my home movies. Is this possible? Where do I start?

MAx

[black_eagle]

Have a read of this http://kodi.wiki/view/Video_management which will explain everything. Section 5.2 should help you out a bit regarding your home movies.

[DarrenHill]

Three ways you could get around the first issue:

1) When you set the source up, you can set it as "None" type (ie not movies, tv shows or music etc) and then it won't try to scan the folder or sub-folder.
2) Similarly when you set things up, select the "Exclude path from library updates" option and the content won't be included.
3) Make use of NFO files (wiki) to give your files proper metadata, so they can properly be included in the library even though they're personal files.

For the second question, it scrapers metadata from various on-line libraries and uses that data for the information and images. It does this by cross-referencing the files name with the database entry, hence why file naming is very important for Kodi (and why your files above get "random" entries, as it's the closest match the scraper can find to what's in their databases).

[MaxArk68]

Wow. Thanks for the replies guys! I wasn't expecting anything so quickly, but no complaints.

Lots to consider and read up on!

Looks like I need to wipe my library from Kodi and start over using Darren's suggestions and reading up on the wiki by black_eagle.

If I make custom "metadata", where is this data stored for access by Kodi?

[DarrenHill]

For the last item - it depends a little on the data. Most of it can go in the NFO file itself, or you can reference local files (for thumbnail and fanart images for example) or web links if you prefer (or a mix and match of any/all of them).

Have a look at these two wiki pages for some general NFO file examples - Custom video entries (wiki) and NFO files/Movies (wiki). They're not complicated, from those examples you should be able to get something working I think.