Adding Windows Home Server to Kodi Media Sources

I’ve been using Kodi for a couple of months now and just getting to grips with some of the features.

I’m running Kodi 17 on an Amazon Fire TV box and trying to add all the movies, videos etc I have on my WHS 2011 windows home server into Kodi libraries.

My Windows Server shows up OK when adding to Media Sources (video/movies etc), and can navigate to the various shared folders on the server and the files themselves play fine on Kodi – but I have 2 main issues:

(1) the Kodi library doesn’t seem to be saved between sessions and
(2) I can’t seem to get any of the movie metadata in any of the library views (which means I am forced to select movies to play just by file names)

I’m using TMDB.org as the media scaper and the files are named as documented but no metadata information seems to be attached to the videos (most are MP4 format). I’ve tried updating the MP4 files on the server itself to embed the TMDB metadata using a video conversion tool – which seems to work fine locally, but of course is very time intensive and kind of defeats the point of the Kodi media library / TMDB integration features.

I’ve read some conflicting notes on what types of network shares / protocols work fully within Kodi, including this on the Kodi Wiki:-

“Note: UPnP won’t work with the library features (scanning data in like summaries and movie covers) in Kodi, but just about all the other options should be fine.”

Does this mean that to use the TMDB / metadata info in the libraries, I need to access the WHS shares using some other network protocol (SMB/NFS etc)?

Also is the same problem with uPNP likely to be the cause of the library data not being saved each time I restart Kodi.

Grateful for any help/guidance.

PS: loving Kodi so far.Smile