Kodi Community Forum

I love Kodi and it's ability to scrape files, download all the metadata and serve it up in a very impressive way. However, I struggle when I just want to open a file or folder on my network and play the file. I have a folder of old PVR files. They all play in VLC. However I cannot seem to navigate to the folder and just pick the files. Some of them are recognized by the TV scraping plugins, but I do not want that process. I have hundreds of old files and they are of old tv shows or specials and many could not be renamed properly. I simply want to open a folder, pick a file, and play it. I have tried "videos" then "files" I can pick the share, but then it only displays the files it recognized not nearly all of them. I am using a Raspberry PI and version 15.2. Any help? I'm sure there is a simple way to do this, but I cannot figure it out.

Going to "Videos -> Files" should give you exactly what you are describing. I do that with a number of videos that I haven't bothered to scan into my library. If a file is not being listed there at all then there might be some other issue, like a file sharing permissions issue on individual video files (seems to happen sometimes) or something weird.

When you add the source under Videos.--> Files, be very sure that the Content Type is set to "None" and "Exclude from Scans" is checked. I do this with several 'home video' type source folders, and it operates exactly as you describe you want. These undefined video sources can even be assigned to a menu or submenu item in most skins.

Another option is to add the folder as a source under "File Manager" -- which is very different from VIdeo --> Files.