Introducing the Library Search script – a WIP script to provide a search facility for music and videos in your library.
Unlike other solutions which query Kodi directly and provide the results in their own windows, this script doesn’t provide any results itself – instead it provides a set of template library nodes which it customises with your search term. This means search results are shown in the skins normal library views; the search types are easy to customise without knowing any Python; there’s the possibility to integrate with other addons to provide results (for example, a PVR search addon could be directly integrated, or there’s the possibility in the future to link to search results from specific addons.)
Background
I often work on little ‘proof of concept’ scripts, where I’m playing around to see if something is possible within Kodi. Most of the time it’s not. Very occasionally it does work, but isn’t interesting enough to share. Once in a blue moon there’s something like this where the basic idea works and is interesting – at which point I’m happy to share the idea with the hope the community can help me bring it through to an actually workable solution.
Installation
The script is available on my personal repo, or for those who are happy manually installing scripts, the source is here.
Known Issues
- Krypton only
- No PVR search
- Navigation still needs some work, and there are features that haven’t even been looked at such as search history and third-party plugin integration
- Search results are limited by the power of library nodes. In practical terms that means we’re looking at search results where the items ‘contain’ the search string, and that the final ‘categories’ for search results need refining
- Because it, to some degree, abuses the Library Nodes feature of Kodi it’s quite possible this won’t be considered acceptable for the official Kodi repo
- All those thousands of minor issues hopefully you can help in finding
Any and all feedback is very welcome.