[Yanta]

I've been tinkering with Kodi for a while now and it has been a great learning experience. Without the dedicated support of some wonderful people here I would not have gotten Kodi working.

People who deserve a special mention are Karellan, Gade, Klojum and PatK. Thank you all so much for your generous help and patience as I've gone through this learning process.

I'm sure there are other people who've provided assistance, and your help has certainly been appreciated too.

I originally embarked on my Kodi journey because the Movie Label program I purchased in 2013 was so full of bugs it had become useless. The support for it was non-existent so I needed something else to manage my library.

Sadly, after a family discussion last night everyone has asked me to remove Kodi from their computers.

Why?

• Kodi is not multi user, and does not appear to he heading in that direction.
  
• Kodi is not a library manager in the true sense of the term. It's a media player, so there are things that I need that Kodi has so far been unable to do (That's not Kodi's fault - It's that my expectations of Kodi were uninformed)
  
• Watched status, where I'm up to in a TV series (or how far through an individual episode), are just not supported.
  
• Even with separate client databases (on a central Kodi server) once you watch a series you have to mark it unwatched and you lose your play count and last watched date by doing that
  
• The information we would like to see on a skin just can't be added (Play count, last watched date).
  
• Between the 6 PCs it was installed on there would be at least one crash per day, often more.
  
• There is no global shutdown option when finished playing queued items. Users have to remember to set a custom shutdown timer before watching something. Which is almost always forgotten
  

This is not a request for support, just observations of what is.

I will keep my Kodi server for my own personal use and may pop in from time to time as I experiment with different things.

Everyone else has gone back to Pot Player

Again, thank you all for your kind support.

Tanya

[Karellen]

Oh, I am very sorry to hear that. We know that Kodi is not for everybody and this is one of those cases unfortunately.

 

• Watched status, where I'm up to in a TV series (or how far through an individual episode), are just not supported.
  
• Even with separate client databases (on a central Kodi server) once you watch a series you have to mark it unwatched and you lose your play count and last watched date by doing that
  
• The information we would like to see on a skin just can't be added (Play count, last watched date).
  

 

I do agree with you on the above points which are related. I am big on playcounts and last played dates as well. It is the main method we use to choose which tv show we are next going to binge watch. And most skins seem to find it more important to show ratings instead of other information. My workaround is...

• Main TV Show listing sorted using "Date Last Played" with oldest at the bottom. So I am picking shows at the bottom of the list, then they end up at the top of the list once you play the first episode.
  
• Episode listings sorted using "Playcount" with lowest count at the top. This overcomes the problem of keeping track of which episode is the next one to watch.
  

Let us know when you have found something more suitable for your needs.

[Klojum]

Between the 6 PCs it was installed on there would be at least one crash per day, often more.

Sorry, but that is frankly a bit strange. Are those fully bloated Windows PC's, or PC's with small Kodi solutions like LibreELEC?

[Yanta]

Between the 6 PCs it was installed on there would be at least one crash per day, often more.

Sorry, but that is frankly a bit strange. Are those fully bloated Windows PC's, or PC's with small Kodi solutions like LibreELEC? 

Lol. Fully "bloated" windows... But don't stress. Not looking to solve the issue. It is what it is.

[Yanta]

Let us know when you have found something more suitable for your needs. 

 I don't think I will find anything more suited to my needs. Kodi is really the best.

Given Kodi is open source I guess if I wanted to I could get access to the Database structures?

I could easily write something to track the play count and last watched dates (or indeed, every date watched), but the independent watched states per client with remembering where in a season and where within an episode one is up to is not something I think writing anything external to Kodi would work.

[Klojum]

Good developers are always welcome, as are "PR's".
This link may help you find your way: https://kodi.wiki/view/Development

[jjd-uk]

I could easily write something to track the play count and last watched dates (or indeed, every date watched)

I could be mistaken but I think those should already be possible via

ListItem.PlayCount
ListItem.LastPlayed

See https://kodi.wiki/view/InfoLabels

However it's up to the skinners what infolabels they want to use so not sure if any skins currently take advantage of those infolabels so you might have to get your hands dirty and have a go at editing whatever your favourite skin is to include them, or request the skinner to include them.

[Yanta]

I could easily write something to track the play count and last watched dates (or indeed, every date watched)

I could be mistaken but I think those should already be possible via

ListItem.PlayCount
ListItem.LastPlayed

See https://kodi.wiki/view/InfoLabels

However it's up to the skinners what infolabels they want to use so not sure if any skins currently take advantage of those infolabels so you might have to get your hands dirty and have a go at editing whatever your favourite skin is to include them, or request the skinner to include them.   

I use the rapier skin and I did approach @Gade about adding the above, but he felt that it might bloat the skin. That's fine. Though I could careless about ratings and would happily sacrifice that for last date watched. But he's the developer and I respect his decision.

I too believe they are available. The problem is in a multi user environment when person A watches a series, person B  and C and so on will see the series as watched. If they want to they can set it back to unwatched so they can keep track of what episode they are up to. Setting a show to unwatched sets the play count to zero and removes the last date played. Now if you have multiple people watching the same series and they up to different points in a season... welll.. gets really messy.

IMHO, the problem is that Kodi is not built on a multi-user foundation. There's been a huge effort in the v18 upgrade, but nothing that I could see that suggested a more multi-user approach to the software.

We discussed the option of setting up each PC with it's own local library and dropping the man-in-middle Kodi/MySQL server. I could remove that PC and cut my electricity bills and would resolve the need for independent watch states. But they complained about the crashing and inability to shutdown when finished playing queued items. Some people are just never happy

Personally, even with the few shortcomings Kodi has I still think it's great!

[willemd]

The Mimic skin shows 'last played' and the 'play count' in the info screens.

edit: Obviously that won't help you when you reset the view counts with the 'watched status' and so on. This was just meant as general info that there are in fact skins that show this info.

I have never used this feature, but don't Profiles do what you want?
https://kodi.wiki/view/Profiles

[jjd-uk]

Kodi does allow multi-users via Profiles however it's not perfect at the moment, there is a desire to completely rewrite Profile support to work better in multi-user environments, but as with many things voluntary open source projects such as Kodi the people who most want to improve this are those without the time to do it themselves. We had hoped making it a project available for students entering the Google Summer of Code might result in something but that hasn't worked out yet either.

Does each family member only use their own device for playback? or are some of the devices shared between family members?

[ponkotsu]

• Watched status, where I'm up to in a TV series (or how far through an individual episode), are just not supported.
  
• Even with separate client databases (on a central Kodi server) once you watch a series you have to mark it unwatched and you lose your play count and last watched date by doing that
  

Hi @Yanta

I remember your thread in @Gade's forum. I made the suggestion of using the 5-user MySQL trick. I have a similar setup as yours, where I have several Kodi clients, and my brother has a couple of his own. Neither of us use the other's Kodi device, we stick to our own. I just verified in our databases that the shows I've watched have playcounts and lastplayed dates, while my brother's do not. I do use Rapier's (Kodi's) highlighting of watched vs. unwatched episodes to remind me where I left off in a TV series. Rapier does also show a partially filled circle when I'm partway through an individual episode (or a movie), with the percentage of fill roughly representing how much of the episode I've watched.

I think the 5-user MySQL trick (apparently modified to 8 users, assuming you're using Krypton) would get both the above bulletpoints taken care of. Since you have 6 users, all you have to do is delete any lines referring to the 7th and 8th users in the script, paste it into your favorite MySQL client (phpmyadmin / navicat / commandline client / etc), and run it. After that, just edit the advancedsettings for each client to point them to their respective database name.

Afraid I can't help much with the other bullet points though.

N.B.: I am the only one who adds media to the library in my house. My brother is just a viewer. I don't know if he can add anything to the library or not. If you want all your users to have the ability to add to the library, I can't say whether or not it will work as I've never tried.

[jjd-uk]

Shutdown could possibly be handled by this addon https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=124888

[Yanta]

Does each family member only use their own device for playback? or are some of the devices shared between family members?

 One PC downstairs could have been used by multiple people (Shared HTPC)

5 were used only by the person in whose room the PC resides
2 PCs never made it to set up.

[mellomade]

@Yanta - you should look into Emby.  Though it is not free, it handles individual users independently while tracking watched status, etc, separately for each user.  There is even support for Kodi (which replaces Kodi's db).  I use this setup much in the same way you do - with one device per user (they don't change/share user accounts) using Kodi as the front end and Emby for the back end duties (library management).  I have no commercial interest in Emby - just a happy user for many years.