Using Kodi to play Music Videos

[LuvMyQuad]

Since Ive been ripping disks over the last few years Ive been keeping the video clips from various DVD-A, DVDs and Bluerays. They are all saved as MKV files and named for what they are. I want to start playing them in Kodi. Is there anything special i need to do with them? Anyone have any tips specific to music videos?

 

[atrocity]

Since Ive been ripping disks over the last few years Ive been keeping the video clips from various DVD-A, DVDs and Bluerays. They are all saved as MKV files and named for what they are. I want to start playing them in Kodi. Is there anything special i need to do with them? Anyone have any tips specific to music videos?

My only suggestion is to look into creating .nfo files (if you haven't already). They aren't mandatory, but they're useful.

 

[haikubass]

I've been doing the same, got a big stash now. Had a hard time to get Oppo 93 play some of them, hope Kodi will solve that. Also, I'd like to merge HD videos (found anywhere) with the best audio available - made a lot of these, great stuff.
Anyhow, I'll dig into this fully this winter, as I'm still ripping my collection into FLACs first, but I'm all ears if anyone have any advanced experience.

 

[elmer]

Since Ive been ripping disks over the last few years Ive been keeping the video clips from various DVD-A, DVDs and Bluerays. They are all saved as MKV files and named for what they are. I want to start playing them in Kodi. Is there anything special i need to do with them? Anyone have any tips specific to music videos?

HomerJau (Garry) is a great resource for all things Kodi not least of which is his MusicMedia Helper app. Naming conventions are important in Kodi. I store all of my music/concert videos on my drive in a folder originally named Music Videos. If it’s a full concert video, the folder is first named artist - title ie Steven Wilson - Get All You Deserve. Within that folder is the MKV file. That can be named whatever you like.mkv. You can either just use that single concert video file or break it down into individual chapters/songs (MusicMedia Helper has some great automated tools for making chapters, naming songs and creating Nfos. Just note that if you break it into individual songs, Kodi does not play them seamlessly - there will be a slight break between songs.

if you are just collecting individual songs from various artists, then the folder structure would be Music Videos/Various Artists - Videos/Artist- Title ie Donald Fagen - New Frontier.

In Kodi you will need to point Videos to the file location on your drive. There is a little bit of trial and error involved but it’s pretty intuitive after you’ve worked with Kodi a bit.

 

[HomerJAU]

Kodi supports Music Videos and can load them into its music library database if you create NFO files (small text files with information about each video file).

Since I collect concerts I created a couple of tools in Music Media Helper to create the NFO files fairly easily.

Check out the MMH Documentation on how it works:

https://reva.blob.core.windows.net/mmh4/Music Media Helper Documentation.pdf
You can split an MKV into chapters to create 1 file per song and semi auto rename to song titles
You can Scrape a Concert to get Cover Poster and Fan Art for Kodi and create NFO
You can create Video (and audio) playlists for Kodi (using the music video files (and audio files)

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Ok, so I guess Im part way there. Using MMH to create NFO files.

Questions:
1. What is the significance of the "track" field in the NFO. They all seem to come up as 1.
2, It seems to be a requirement to load each seperate video into its own subdirectory. Is it really required? is there any way to automate it?
3. I set up a structure similar to how i set up music files, ie: artist folder >> album folders >> music tracks. It works and i get artist thumbnails in Kodi if i load in artist NFOs into the artist video directories (just copied the same ones from the music directories). But i cant get an album art to show up as a thumbnail. Is the structure im using wrong? How can i get album art to show up?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[HomerJAU]

The MMH tool is designed to use for concerts, not single music videos. Concerts act like albums with their songs (files) grouped like album tracks.

With concerts all the songs are placed in one folder and the files become tracks and those are incremented so they get ordered sequentially.

Music Video folders will show artwork using a ‘folder.jpg’. Hence, one folder per concert (album)

Tell me more about your music videos. I assume they are individual songs, not concerts right?

The Kodi developers haven’t done anything to support music videos for a very long time, so I came up with this hack for my concerts. For my individual videos I create folders like:

Various Artists
Atmos Demos
DTS:X Demos
Best Guitar Songs
Etc

Place multiple files in each folder, rename them to 01. Artist - Song Name etc then use MMH to create the NFO file’s for all in each folder (One command).

 

[HomerJAU]

Just rer-read you OP. I’d suggest making a folder for each release and using the same name as the artist - album, renaming the files to the song name, copy the album art from your audio folder. Then use MMH to create all the NFOs using the batch tool.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

The MMH tool is designed to use for concerts, not single music videos. Concerts act like albums with their songs (files) grouped like album tracks.

With concerts all the songs are placed in one folder and the files become tracks and those are incremented so they get ordered sequentially.

Music Video folders will show artwork using a ‘folder.jpg’. Hence, one folder per concert (album)

Yeah. i tried that. maybe i have to rescan or something. The folder.jpg dosent show up.

Tell me more about your music videos. I assume they are individual songs, not concerts right?

There are both types, For example, I would consider Big Big Train - Reflectors of Light as a concert video, When ripped to MKV I get one large continuous video file with embedded chapters and a couple of extra files (bonus clips). Then there are things like the Tull albums that typically have a video clip or two. There are also large groups of single videos like Peter Gabriel - Play DVD.

Place multiple files in each folder, rename them to 01. Artist - Song Name etc then use MMH to create the NFO file’s for all in each folder (One command).

Ok, the tracks arent currently named with the ##.artist - song format. I can change that. Is the file naming format a requirement fot the library? For MMH?

 

[HomerJAU]

There are both types, For example, I would consider Big Big Train - Reflectors of Light as a concert video, When ripped to MKV I get one large continuous video file with embedded chapters and a couple of extra files (bonus clips).

Use MMH to split the single MKV into chapters (making one file per track) and rename. You can cut and paste the entire track list from a text file or copied off the web, into MMH and it will rename all the files to what's n the text you pasted. Then let MMH make the NFOs.

Ok, the tracks arent currently named with the ##.artist - song format. I can change that. Is the file naming format a requirement fot the library? For MMH?

There's no requirement to do that (Kodi or MMH) BUT. When MMH makes the NFO file it will capture that info and when you scan in Kodi the file name becomes the track title so its easy to see what you want to play.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

So I think I'm making good progress following the direction here. I rip the MKVs, split into chapters, rename the chapters, create the NFO files, load in a folder pic for the artwork. It all shows up nicely once its scanned in.

Questions. I had to set Kodi to stop reverting to the default audio track with every new chapter. The switch is in one of the language options. So now it selects the best audio stream available, but I cant seem to get it to play back "gapless" video. There is a hiccup every time it moves on to a the next chapter. Is this normal? Is there any fix for this?

 

[HomerJAU]

Nice to hear of your progress.

Kodi plays the default MKV audio stream by default. You found the other option which sets the stream to a language. I don't know how to Getz Kodi to find the Best Stream.

When I rip my concert discs to MKV using MakeMKV I only ever rip the best surround mix (Lossless) as that’s all I’ll listen to.

There’s a free program MKVToolNix that allows you to change the default audio stream in any MKV file, but that works one MKV at a time. If you want to do that I‘d suggest changing your original MKV with chapters, then resplit in MMH.

Slightly off topic, MMH also has a Merge MKV and FLAC tool than adds a FLAC file to an MKV and makes the FLAC the default audio stream. I added that so I could batch that task when doing Penteo upmixes of stereo concerts. The upmixed 5.1 (or 4.1) FLACs get played. The Penteo UM uses stereo track.

If you’ve got hundreds on music vids, maybe I could add a new batch tool to auto change the default audio streams for all MKVs under a root folder?

I get a very small Pause between music videos. Almost not noticeable. I have a cache configured on my two NUCs.

 

[MagnumX]

I currently have 371 music videos. I just keep them in their own folder organized by "Artist_Name - Song" and add that folder to KODI. The "music video" section/scraper of KODI never worked very well, IMO. I think that works fine for relatively few music videos like that.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Kodi plays the default MKV audio stream by default. You found the other option which sets the stream to a language. I don't know how to Getz Kodi to find the Best Stream.

I skimmed the Wiki. I believe it works like this: Kodi determines the highest quality audio stream using number of channels, sample rate, etc. It then chooses the best available audio stream that has been enabled for pass through. I think the ordering in the pass through settings is the same as the quality ordering. So if a track has both Dolby digital and DTS-MA, it chooses the latter as long as you have DTS-MA enabled for pass through, if nothing better is enabled, it plays the default. The setting to do this doesn't actually stream a language, but its in the same menu where you choose the language for the system. The option below the language choice asks if you want to give preference to the default audio stream. If turned off, the system checks what is pass through enabled and plays the best audio stream. In my limited playing so far, it seems to work just like described.

There’s a free program MKVToolNix that allows you to change the default audio stream in any MKV file, but that works one MKV at a time. If you want to do that I‘d suggest changing your original MKV with chapters, then resplit in MMH.

I have MKVToolNix. I've only used it so far to merge split files back together after they have been split by MMH and I dont want them split. Make MKV sometimes errors when marking chapters. On The McCartney Years set it cut off the last few seconds of Wonderful Christmastime and C'mon People and put the end in a separate chapter. I merged them back together.

Do you keep the unsplit MKV as well as the split chapters?

I get a very small Pause between music videos. Almost not noticeable. I have a cache configured on my two NUCs.

Well mine is certainly noticeable, and it was even worse when the pre-pro kept reverting back to stereo with every track change (before I discovered the setting described above).

Is the cache thing relatively easy to do? Can you describe the steps?

 

[HomerJAU]

If Kodi is processing all the audio streams of each video file prior to playback to get ‘best audio’ that obviously contributes to the pause between music videos.

I don’t believe MakeMKV gets the chapters wrong. They are probably authored incorrectly on the disc. You can edit the chapter start times in an MKV with MMH or MKVToolNix.

See Kodi’s AdvancedSettings Cache section on their wiki.

Edit: link
https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache

 

[HomerJAU]

Here’s a post showing one of my media player’s AdvancedSettings file, see the cache section:

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...-to-setup-and-install-kodi.27166/#post-464037

 

[LuvMyQuad]

So I continue my journey into building my music video library. At present, all my video is ripped to MKV. All NFO files are written. More or less, it all shows up properly in the Kodi library. For all of the live concerts i ripped, i kept both the full video with chapters and individual tracks as split using MMH. I can always delete them if I decide they aren't needed, and I have enough storage space to experiment. I kept both because I'm unsure I can handle the glich that seems to happen when going from one chapter to another. I think it's at least partly a function of my pre/pro, as it seems to need to switch out of whatever surround mode the video requires to the default Kodi GUI mode which is 16/44.1 stereo. This happens at the end of each track, which disrupts the action. I haven't checked the pre/pro settings closely yet. Nor if there is some way for Kodi to hold on the format through the track change. None of this applies to true music video collections that have a defined start and end for each video. The track change is a non issue for those. But onward.

Can someone tell me what the M3U playlists will do for me? I haven't tried those yet other than to create them in a test folder so I could look at them. It just seems to be a playlist of all the individual chapters as defined by the NFOs. It seems using them would be the same as starting at chapter 1 and just letting Kodi auto play the next chapter just like it does for music?. Is it to put together a playlist of mixed artists? Like "videos from 1995". The question is, Do I need the playlists for what I'm trying to do? What do you all do with full length live videos? Playback seems simplified if they are left as a single file, there is still chapter skip/replay functions. There is just no easy way to see the track choices like you'd have with a main menu on a disc.

 

[HomerJAU]

I use M3U playlists in Kodi so I can use my iPad Kodi Music Remote to play any track from any concert/music video. This is a workaround for playing music videos as the Kodi Music Remote is targeted for Kodi music (audio only) library and doesn’t ‘see’ the music video library.

I create an M3U playlist for each concert that includes every song file in the concert. MMH has a tool to auto scan all music video sub-folders recursively and create all the M3U files automatically.

If you copy these files to your Kodi UserData folder, Playlists, Mixed folder, the Kodi Music Remote sees these playlists (Mixed is intended for playlists that contain both audio and video). In the Music Remote theres a a list of PlayLists so I can see all my concerts. Clicking on a PlayList opens it and I see all the concert song titles and can then play or queue any I select. No need to use my normal remote control and navigate on the Kodi UI (TV).

I also use M3U playlists to create Audio Only playlists. I have these for things like: Best Quad Music, Demo Surround Music, Best Acoustic Guitar Music etc. If I copy those playlists to Kodi’s UserData, PlayLists, Music folder the iPad Music Remote shows those playlists and I can play all tracks or pick and queue any track from any playlist, again without having to navigate the main Kodi UI (TV).

The MMH docs has more info on a couple of tools to help create M3U PlayLists.

 

[LuvMyQuad]

I use M3U playlists in Kodi so I can use my iPad Kodi Music Remote to play any track from any concert/music video. This is a workaround for playing music videos as the Kodi Music Remote is targeted for Kodi music (audio only) library and doesn’t ‘see’ the music video library.

I create an M3U playlist for each concert that includes every song file in the concert. MMH has a tool to auto scan all music video sub-folders recursively and create all the M3U files automatically.

If you copy these files to your Kodi UserData folder, Playlists, Mixed folder, the Kodi Music Remote sees these playlists (Mixed is intended for playlists that contain both audio and video). In the Music Remote theres a a list of PlayLists so I can see all my concerts. Clicking on a PlayList opens it and I see all the concert song titles and can then play or queue any I select. No need to use my normal remote control and navigate on the Kodi UI (TV).

I also use M3U playlists to create Audio Only playlists. I have these for things like: Best Quad Music, Demo Surround Music, Best Acoustic Guitar Music etc. If I copy those playlists to Kodi’s UserData, PlayLists, Music folder the iPad Music Remote shows those playlists and I can play all tracks or pick and queue any track from any playlist, again without having to navigate the main Kodi UI (TV).

The MMH docs has more info on a couple of tools to help create M3U PlayLists.

OK I see. Thanks Homer. I dont use a Kodi remote. My son does, so he might be interested. Too bad there isnt a way to create a playlist that would just identify and access individual chapers in the full length video file. There would then be no need to split them.

 

[HomerJAU]

Too bad there isnt a way to create a playlist that would just identify and access individual chapers in the full length video file

I just did a bit of reading and M3U playlists do support a start time and duration so that means I could get MMH to create a single M3U with all tracks using MKV chapter data for a single MKV source.

Does Kodi support M3U with chapter times? I don’t know but will test first before I write the MMH code

If Kodi doesn’t I can log a request with their developer team.

EDIT: It may be possible to use a CUE file for music videos too. Kodi supports CUE for audio files.