These months, I’ve hacked my way through doing this. For movies, I’m using a “scraper” called the “Stupid Movie Scraper” that simply adds films by their filename, and does nothing else (doesn’t fetch poster, fanart, etc). For series, I’m using a more complicated script that scans the series folder and creates a tvshow.nfo file for the main folder, and then an individual .nfo file per episode – I’ve put a line to run kodi.exe when the script starts, so it runs every time I open Kodi. All this is very… workaround-ish, and just plain ugly in terms of design – not to mention, Windows only for the case of series (it’s a .bat script).
How come there still isn’t a simple, no questions asked “scraper” that just adds videos? Isn’t it awful that if a scraper doesn’t recognize a movie that you have (and remember that there are literally hundreds of cases for obscure movies that fall into this category), the movie isn’t deemed “real” and thus is not added? Even though you have the data right there… or what if someone doesn’t have an internet connection? One may argue that such user shouldn’t use Kodi beacuse without Internet you can’t download the poster, plot, etc – but the UI of Kodi is still much more presentable and organized than opening videos by using the file explorer of the OS (adapted to big screen, you can still get thumbnail, a pretty skin, etc).
The .nfo scraper kind of does this, but it still far from ideal because you have to manually make the .nfo file for every single film… which is just very unpractical – to make a parallel with other software, imagine if music players forced you do right click a song and then press something like “create id3 tags” before being able to include the song in your library, instead of just trying its best to read it without any id3 tags (which all music players do, by using the filename).
So my request is that hopefully the .nfo scraper evolves into automatically making an .nfo for every movie detected. Note that other managers like Plex and maybe Emby already have this feature (even with the online scraper, the movie still gets added if it’s not found – no poster, not plot, sure, but it gets added), so I really hope Kodi steps up on this part because there’s definitely use for it (I’d consider it a most basic function), and a lot of interest (I didn’t code any of the two methods I describe in the first paragraph).