[Pdubbbs]

I tried the local data only approach first also, the issue is that many skins, by design, are built to use underlying services like the skin helper service and the extended info service that use a movies IMDB id or TMDB id to query movie from the internet to get the latest possible info.  You can absolutely use local data only for a lot of things (artwork, some metadata) ...but in my experience, it only gets you so far. But it all boils down to what skin/setup you're using and how much up-to-date info about the movie you're wanting. 
Another benefit to using TMM is that some skins (i just recently found this out) require items like media source type, resolution type, audio format, to be in the name to be properly flagged inside of Kodi. As far as naming conventions go, I think it's ugly to have all that info in a file name, but it serves a functional purpose inside of Kodi. 

Here is my current naming scheme if you're wanting to do something similar


In my own mind, I use TMM now as a "starting point" so-to-speak to make sure that the correct movie is recognized by kodi and a "break glass in case of emergency" method in case i have to start all over again inside of kodi, I know that with NFO files if i have to rebuild the DB all over again from scratch, Kodi will scrape the correct movie every time because that information has already been hard coded to an NFO.

In the last month I've come a long way too. I had all my movies with no folders or anything just bare "What's Eating Gilbert Grape.mkv", and Im on mac, so for the comment of the file I added the year. Put I realized that putting the year in for every new movie manually is a hassle, and if I ever switched to windows, I would loose that comment column info.

So now I have it as "All or Nothing (2002) 1080p EAC3 (72.0)" and same as you all the folders, nfo, artwork etc. I can also add the subtitles srt to this if the movie is missing it. With my single file ocd, I had to remux the mkv to add the srt, which is a hassle. The 72 is the metascore, which the majority of my movies have, if not I fallback on the imdb score.

Like you mentioned, I see the benefit of only having to do that initial search and scrape once. I have movies in cold storage, so transfer movies every few months into local storage, so my kodi  library is always somewhat temporary. I also like to share my collection. So having to search,match,scrape every time the movie is being utilized would be a hassle.

Since I need to redo my entire 3K movie collection, I am trying to understand every aspect of tmm, and kodi, and how it all works, so I do it right the first time. I don't think I have it in me to have to do a second go!

I will do what you do, and add the Video Codec, will be good to know what that is, because  I could see me replacing all my h264, once we get to h266 or h267 ;P

Not sure if I care so much about blu ray vs. web dl. Can usually tell that based on the audio codec being dts or eac3.

Im assuming that all the artwork needs to be as files, in the same folder as the mkv to work in kodi or other programs? I was thinking I could have an artwork subfolder, so that when I'm in the movie folder I would have the mkv,nfo,srt,and art work folder. Might make it a bit cleaner.

you CAAAANNNNN break the artwork out into a seperate folder...thought about doing that myself....but you would need to tell the scraper where the artwork is and to also put the new artwork there. I chose not to do this because it adds an extra layer of complexity to my already seemingly over complicated environment. I'm not even going to begin to breakdown the process i go through for what a single movie goes through from start to finish... but i will tell you that i have it completely automated to the point where i can walk away from it and the most i have to do is chose the movies i want. 

i enjoy seeing the color cases...kinda like being at a physical movie rental store, I primarily use the cases and the tags at the bottom of the screen to identify the characteristics of the movie im going to watch 



If you are wanting to do movie sets, you DO have to break out the artwork into a seperate directory and tell artwork beef where it is 


If you use the Aeon MQ8 mod skin, you can get results like this which is the fruit of scraping proper data 

Thanks for sharing you're set up, thats pretty impressive. I have 90% of my movies in cold storage, trying to preserve the life of the hard drives as long as possible, if that is even possible, but I will try it this way and see if I can get 10 years out of them versus the standard 5 years. So I just have a temporary HDD with around 100 movies loaded into kodi, then I just delete them as I watch them, keep the good ones and transfer to cold storage once a month, rinse and repeat, but it sure would be nice to have the entire 3K+ movie collection loaded into kodi and being able to watch any movie you feel like.