I add all my movies through .nfo files, in order to have complete control of the metadata on them. My ideal scenario is that this worked much like id3 tags does on audio files – they’re always connected to a file, and they’re immediately recognized upon changing, but, the way Kodi works makes the need for the .nfo to be refreshed (Context > Information > Refresh) for this new metadata to be recognized. Sadly, Kodi also only allows for one file to be updated at a time, so it’s a problem when one modifies the poster, fanart, plot, etc, of many .nfo at a time because it’s time consuming and not very elegant to go through each one of them.
A workaround to this is the “texturecache.py” script presented here on the forums. It has many commands, and for my case, there’s one that, first, removes a movie if it’s detected that the .nfo has been modified, and it then adds it again. With this, you can trigger many films at a time, and ideally update the metadata in all of them… but what happens in practice, is that once the movies are readded, they lose their poster and fanart.
I’ve recorded a video of myself showing the entire process, which I will describe next:
Note: I’m running Windows 8 (the different look is just a theme)
1. You can see that I have two type of movies: DVDs, and single-file ones.
2. I display what the two types of .nfo contain (they’re essentially blank, minus title and some info generated by Kodi)
3. The library is empty, so I add the movies with the .nfo scraper.
4. I remove one of the movies, and then add it again, so you can see that it works.
5. I run the script.
6. It detects all four movies as having their .nfo modified within the last 7 days (true), removes them, and then readds them.
7. The single-file movies are readded without a poster. The DVDs have their posted untouched.
8. Refreshing them individually works.
Thoughts?