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galak6 · 2022-12-02, 12:12

Hello,

I have a bunch of external hard drive with movie on it. The movie are all scraped correctly and adding into my kodi library. Now the fun part... Is there a way for kody to tell me "please plug hard drive n°3 to play this movie" when I select a movie in the library ? For the moment if I choose a movie and it's not the correct external drive plug in, kodi want to remove it from the library.
I can't find any information about a such thing.

Thanks !

**DarrenHill** · 2022-12-03, 13:40

No, there's no way of automatically doing that as it's not really how it's designed to work.

Kodi is designed to work with storage that is "always available", and if it can't see stuff then the assumption is that it may no longer be available, hence the offer of removal from the library.

**Klojum** · 2022-12-03, 15:37

Perhaps a bit of file management will help. As in, drive 1 does video titles/names starting A-F, drive 2 does videos starting G-M, und so weiter.

galak6 · 2022-12-03, 15:50

Too bad. I was hoping something like that. It will be simple to implement with just "adding" a storage name with the movie, or automatically adding this information when scrapping the movie.
Thanks for your answer !

NeoCortex · 2022-12-03, 16:07

Depending on what skin you use, when you bring up the info screen, one of the options will display the file location. I know the default skin used to, but I admittedly haven't used it in a while. So that may have changed.

**jbinkley60** · 2022-12-03, 21:03

(2022-12-03, 15:50)galak6 Wrote: Too bad. I was hoping something like that. It will be simple to implement with just "adding" a storage name with the movie, or automatically adding this information when scrapping the movie.
Thanks for your answer !

Thee is a solution which will do almost exactly what you want minus the prompting to insert drive XYZ. I mention this solution not because I expect you'll move to it but to illustrate it is possible and maybe something similar could be developed as an addon for Kodi. The Mezzmo Kodi addon solution will do what you want when running win Kodi in GUI mode and Mezzmo. How it works is that you would import all of your drives into the Mezzmo database. When you browse a folder or playlists in GUI mode, Mezzmo only presents things from its library which it detects as available to play. If something is in the library but the media isn't available (i.e. the drive plugged in) it won't display the content for playback. Thus by what is available you know which drive is plugged in. In native mode this doesn't work because native mode runs from the Kodi database which has everything, even if it isn't available for playback. This is the same as what you are seeing. In the real world you'd probably just plug all of the drives into the Mezzmo server and not have to deal with drive swapping.

So a thought is that if there was an addon developed or skin integration which would only display what is found vs. what is in Kodi's library the behavior you want would happen. There would be a slight delay to detect the media but OS level calls like this are fairly quick. Mezzmo shows no noticeable delay doing this. I believe I've seen one other request in the past for this type of behavior. One other thought is why can't you plug all of the drives into your Kodi device ? If it is a lack of USB ports a USB bridge could solve that. Just curious.

Thanks,

Jeff

galak6 · 2022-12-04, 11:05

The mezzmo solution is not really what I search. I see Kodi more like a way to show all the movie I got, think like a bunch of Blueray/dvd laying in your shelves but instead of looking at the Bluray/dvd box to select a movie, you just search via Kodi with all the information, the possibility to watch the trailer, etc... And when you have choose a movie, it just ask you to put it in the discplayer to start watching it.
So why not with an external drive with some movie in it ?
To be honest, I was using kodi a few years ago (when it was still called xmbc) and have stop using it because of that. I was hoping that a such function was now availabe Wink

And for all the hard drive pluged in my kodi player it will be possible if I have only one player in my house, but it's not the case, that's why I prefer kodi to tell me which disk to plug in. See that at a real librairy and kodi is just a fancy way to display it before watching anything.
Thanks for your time !

**jbinkley60** · 2022-12-04, 14:55

(2022-12-04, 11:05)galak6 Wrote: The mezzmo solution is not really what I search. I see Kodi more like a way to show all the movie I got, think like a bunch of Blueray/dvd laying in your shelves but instead of looking at the Bluray/dvd box to select a movie, you just search via Kodi with all the information, the possibility to watch the trailer, etc... And when you have choose a movie, it just ask you to put it in the discplayer to start watching it.
So why not with an external drive with some movie in it ?
To be honest, I was using kodi a few years ago (when it was still called xmbc) and have stop using it because of that. I was hoping that a such function was now availabe
And for all the hard drive pluged in my kodi player it will be possible if I have only one player in my house, but it's not the case, that's why I prefer kodi to tell me which disk to plug in. See that at a real librairy and kodi is just a fancy way to display it before watching anything.
Thanks for your time !

I understand your problem completely and years ago I started out with a 400 DVD jukebox player, then moved to a standalone player with a built-in hard drive, then to Kodi and finally to Mezzmo with Kodi as the player. Now I have a few thousand DVDs/Blu-rays in tubs in the basement Smile

Mezzmo does everything you (minus the promoting) want but is overkill for this request. I found a thread where I helped someone else who had a somewhat similar ask like yours. They ended up using an Excel spreadsheet to drive an addon which they could call and it would tell them which drive to attach. Kodi is a database driven approach to selecting / playing media but without real time state checking of the underling media. What you want could be developed as an addon. Unfortunately it isn't something I would have time to do right now.

One partial approach might be to export your library via the Movie View table to CSV files and then print the relevant columns so you can see the file names (i.e. column c22 for movie view) and then you'd know which movies are on which drives. Klujum's suggestion is good too where you categorize by drive. Just thinking out loud here.

Jeff