Kodi Community Forum

Is there a way to simply browse to a video or music file on an external HDD and open it without having to deal with libraries ?
I have all my music and videos organized in file structures in a way so that I can find them quickly and easily. Kodi would be a perfect media player on a Raspberry because it supports all formats and can be controlled by a remote instead of a mouse, but I would prefer to open the files directly and not from libraries.

Yes of course, from the files menu.

Maybe I am stupid but I installed Kodi on my OSX to get familiar with it and I could not find out how to do it. In Video -> Add menu I could only select folders but not files, when I did that the file inside the folder was integrated into the library and only then I could open it. In Video -> File menu, there were two folders, Trash and Video (with no content), and I could not navigate anywhere except into these folders (also it was not clear to me where these folders were located).

you first have to add a folder to the video section BUT you don't have to set a media type for this folder or scan it into your library. Once you added the folder (share, mount point, whatever you want to call it) you can browse this folder in file view (Videos -> Files) and play directly from there without adding anything to the library ever.

Thank you, I will try this today.