[Jhyrachy]

Hi everybody!

Do not know if this is the correct section, in case sorry.

I have a linux device with an external hard drive with my film collection.
I want to access this hard disk on every Kodi device in my home.

Previusly i used an embedded android device with a parser, to automatically find and add to the library any new film, downloading metadata, artwork, etc.
There is any backend that provide this capability?

Thanks a lot!

[nickr]

Linux just simply needs to run nfs or samba. Indexing is done by kodi on the frontend.

[Jhyrachy]

Linux just simply needs to run nfs or samba. Indexing is done by kodi on the frontend.

but the metadata, the artwork, etc, are stored on the client this way, not on the server, right?.

The cool thing about my previus setup (the server was an android kodi with UpNp library share) was that only the kodi "server" needed to update library and download metadata, and it will feed them to any client who connected

[Prof Yaffle]

Then the same applies, does it not? Kodi on Linux, Windows or iOS can scrape and publish the library over UPnP just as effectively as Kodi on Android. So any Linux distro will theoretically do, although sticking to something supported (Ubuntu, basically) is likely to save grief in the long term - some of the less-used platforms invariably end up causing issues that you'd need to dig into to fix. That said, the speed/capability of your host system may affect your choice as well.

It sounds to me like this "parser" is the bigger issue, as Kodi doesn't normally automatically detect and scan new content. If you're using an addon then it should be cross-platform, but otherwise that's the functionality you're looking to replace. You may also want to look at other DLNA servers if that's the only purpose of Kodi on the backend (versus using it to watch stuff as well).

[Jhyrachy]

Then the same applies, does it not? Kodi on Linux, Windows or iOS can scrape and publish the library over UPnP just as effectively as Kodi on Android. So any Linux distro will theoretically do, although sticking to something supported (Ubuntu, basically) is likely to save grief in the long term - some of the less-used platforms invariably end up causing issues that you'd need to dig into to fix. That said, the speed/capability of your host system may affect your choice as well.

It sounds to me like this "parser" is the bigger issue, as Kodi doesn't normally automatically detect and scan new content. If you're using an addon then it should be cross-platform, but otherwise that's the functionality you're looking to replace. You may also want to look at other DLNA servers if that's the only purpose of Kodi on the backend (versus using it to watch stuff as well).

kodi has the best scraper i ever found, and also it include an UpnP server!

If there was a way to run it WITHOUT the GUI but as a service it would have been perfect!

There are already addons like "watchdog" that automatically looks for new files and parse them.

So what i would need is to run kodi first in GUI mode, install all the proper addons and start the UpnP server.
Restart kodi as a service (without any GUI) and enjoy it on any device.

I hate that kodi gui will keep wasting energy when is not needed, but looks like the fastest solution

[jonandtice]

For a headless media server, the best solution I've found is to use Emby media server on the server (my preference is Ubuntu) and then use the Emby addon for Kodi.