[Roman_V_M]

External Kodi Videolibrary Client

This addon allows to browse and play videofiles from a medialibrary on a remote Kodi instance with syncing playback and watched status. It is similar to Emby or Plex addons but for Kodi.

Source code: https://github.com/romanvm/kodi.external.library

Motivation
Currently, Kodi supports 2 ways of accessing a common medialibrary from different devices with syncing playback and watched status:

• Files on network shares with the common MySQL/MariaDB database.
  
• UPnP/DLNA access to the "server" Kodi instance.
  

However, setting up a common MySQL/MariaDB database require some technical knowledge. Also all Kodi instances that access this database must be of the same major version. On the other hand, UPnP/DLNA access does not support full medialibrary information and introduces unnecessary overhead of streaming if files are located on network shares.

This plugin provides an alternative way of accessing a remote Kodi medialibrary and has the following advantages:

• It's easy to configure. Just enable Web server and Application control in the target Kodi instance and set host, port, login and password in the plugin to access it.
  
• It supports all medialibrary information that can be retrieved and set via JSON-RPC and Python APIs.
  
• Client and "server" Kodi instances can be of different major versions (but not too different) because JSON-RPC API does not change that much between versions.
  

By default, files are streamed from the built-in HTTP server of a remote Kodi instance, but the plugin also supports playing files directly from network shares if the remote Kodi uses network shares as media sources.

Known issues

• "Mark as watched/unwatched" item appears twice in the context menu but only the colored one actually works. The other is no-op.
  
• The plugin also appears in "Programs" section but just displays an information pop-up if launched from there.
  
• Kodi built-in web-server is not very powerful and may have troubles streaming high-bitrate videofiles, especially if the "server" Kodi is being used for something else at the same time. It is recommended to store your files on network shares.
  

Those are Kodi limitations.

Installation

The plugin can be installed from the official Kodi addon repository -> Video add-ons section.

Setup
Remote Kodi
In "Settings" > "Services" > "Control" section enable the built-in web-server and remote control as shown on the screenshot.


Plugin Settings
In the first section ("Access") enter the host address of your remote Kodi instance. Also provide the port number, login and password configured on the previous step.


License
GPL v.3

Important!
Please always include a debug log in your bug reports. Do not post logs here but put them on some pastebin site and provide a link. No log, no help.

[matthuisman]

Very cool

Do you find this quicker than shared SQL?

I find shared DB can be quite slow especially in the home menu widgets.
My plan was a service on each client to sync their local DBs with the remote so the client is always using its local sqllite db.

And to confirm - this addon populates the library as usual?
Or do you access all the remote media via the plugin?
Looked at code, can see you access if via the plugin

[Roman_V_M]

Yes, it's a Python plugin. Probably, it can be implemented as a VFS addon but my C++ skills aren't that good. I didn't do any speed comparison with a shared DB, I just wanted to have something simple to set-up that could work accross Kodi versions. The first working prototype was created a long time ago when I had even older Android tabled that couldn't run the same Kodi version as my primary HTPC so a shared DB was not an option. Now I just decided to pick up this project and make it suitable for a public release.