Kodi Community Forum

Hi,

With "vfs-libarchive" or "vfs-rar" plugins installed on a Firestick 4K using Kodi v18.7 "Leia," I have trouble with very long delays, some times even Kodi crashes when opening my library that contains non-video ".rar" and ".zip" files. Removing the plugins removes any delays, and the library search works fine.

From the logs, it seems that it hangs indexing those .rar files with errors like "NFS3ERR_ACCES(-13)". To prevent indexing and searching .rar and .zip files i created a advancedsettings.xml file within the Kodi configuration with the following content (Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/userdata/):

xml:
<advancedsettings>

  <musicextensions>

    <remove>.zip|.rar</remove>

  </musicextensions>

  <videoextensions>

   <remove>.zip|.rar</remove>

  </videoextensions>

</advancedsettings>

But this didn't stop Kodi from hanging at the offending files. Is there something that can be done to prevent Kodi from "seeing" and processing those filetypes without removing the addons?

Thanks!

Hi @Karellen can you please change the title of this post to "Prevent Kodi from indexing/searching RAR files"? Thanks!

Sure, done.

Try the .nomedia method... https://kodi.wiki/view/Updating_or_remov...ude_Folder

Keeping your stuff as .rar over extracting it gives you what advantage ?

(2020-07-27, 00:18)Karellen Wrote: [ -> ]Sure, done.

Try the .nomedia method... https://kodi.wiki/view/Updating_or_remov...ude_Folder

Hi, thanks for your answer. I am searching for a method that does not need to alter every unwanted folder to add the .nomedia file. Since many folders are added automatically after download and the contents are heterogeneous, manually adding the file could be time-consuming. But if nothing else works, I might have to go with this option.

@black_eagle I have a NAS with multiple folders, having programs, tutorials, etc. I want to use Kodi to access a movie folder and play-it. I'm not using any of the fancy library's options, title databases, etc. There is "no advantage" of having some files compressed other than save space and improve organization on my side. I'm looking if Kodi has an option for not messing with my very big .rar files without having to alter all my library hierarchy.

Video and music files are already quite compressed. Using .rar compression on top of that is kind of ludicrous in 99% of all cases. Disk space improvements are minimal at best.
If you want to save disk space, turn h264 videos into h265/hevc. Depending on the source quality, you can save from 40% upto 92%. On average, you could get reclaim 70% disk space.

(2020-07-28, 01:42)Klojum Wrote: [ -> ]Video and music files are already quite compressed. Using .rar compression on top of that is kind of ludicrous in 99% of all cases. Disk space improvements are minimal at best.
If you want to save disk space, turn h264 videos into h265/hevc. Depending on the source quality, you can save from 40% upto 92%. On average, you could get reclaim 70% disk space.

Hi @"Klojum," thanks for the comment about the encoding, very handy. But as I said in the previous post, my files are heterogeneous, meaning that this particular NAS does not only have videos and music: there are other types of data, so compressing them in *.rar or *.zip makes sense (text datasets, image datasets, etc.). I don't generally compress any video unless the original file came in this format. 

The issue in this post is not about the benefits or disadvantages of compressed files but about how to prevent Kodi from choking on those compressed files. Since disabling the "vfs-libarchive" addon worked to prevent the delays and crashes, this problem can be related to how Kodi handles indexing files, and maybe it can be prevented without disabling the addon, and without creating a .nomedia file manually in many folders.

Put everything that is a video into a separate folder.