Kodi Community Forum

Hi, I have a problem which seems specific to my library, because it happens on every one of my computers (all Windows 7 and 10, all 64-bit), and it has been happening in every version of Kodi for over three years now. I couldn't find the answer anywhere and I'm sick of it.

I have all my media organized specifically for KODI, I follow all the naming conventions, every file has a .nfo file with the same name (exportet form KODI), etc.
The problem is , that when I scan the collection, KODI cannot find almost half of my movies. But when I go to the video files explorer in KODI and click "information" it immidiately pulls all the data from the .nfo file and adds them to the library. So every time i reinstall KODI I need to manually go through the list and add all the missing movies. I cannot spot any pattern or reason why this happens, it really looks random, which movies are skipped.

This only happens in movies, TV shows are fine.

http://xbmclogs.com seems to be down, so I will post the log as soon as it's up and running

I understand your pain and have been there and have some discovery, listed by the numbers....
and I may have missed a bunch, my memory is clouded, feel free to add.

1) A movie scrape and are presented with choices, it means Kodi didn't know... auto doesn't, you have to tell it,
2) When you scrape a bunch with one meta-data base and then switch to another, the differences can have fall out and misses.
3) You have your movies in folders, and include the date at the end in parenthesis e.g Star Wars (2008) no other garbage
4) You only use Kodi for met-data, not some third party software that pretends to get it all wrong, causing a re-scrape that doesn't
5) You re-scrape with the 'local information only' scraper... switch to a real scraper for the rest and re-scan when prompted.
6) Every once in a blue moon, you export as septate files and 'over write' existing files and .nfo from pervious versions.
7) You use 'video database cleaner', profile cleaner, and system clean-up regularly.
8) You like TheRenamer (wiki)
9) You regularly (every blue moon) jump into your thumbnails folder and delete corrupt looking images.
10) You like to look at your kodi.log in debug mode to check issues of failures and be amazed at the inner workings of Kodi.

More to come... but I've faded, others need to add here.

11) get a mysql shared database so you don't have to re-scrape when you install kodi.

Thank you for the answers!
Unfortunately, the problem seems to be something not covered by PatK, nad a mysql database won't help, since I move and switch machines often. I guess it's just some wierd conflict of filenames or something.
I added all of the movies by going through the files list and pressing "i" on each movie. It's a bit tedious, but whatever.
If anyone has a suspicion about what might be happening I would appreciate a suggestion.
Thanks again for your help.

I'm no longer going to talk about what it could or couldn't be or the perceived short falls of Kodi.

I'll offer a suggestion (I guess it will next time thing).

Go into your source, delete it, clean, re-scan with the local information scraper, if all is jake everything will comes back (picking up your met-data in the folders). Reset the scraper to your favourite... After that everything should be smooth as silk and all should be showing. If even one file is missing or the covers are not missing, then you know you have some corruption or missing meta-data inside that folder. It's #5 in the list but I should have mentioned to export your library to separate files between scrapes to preserve the first run through, so additional scrapes get added properly to the accumulated meta-data in the folder, at one point you will have 100% of the files.