Converting from Windows Media Center / My Movies to Kodi + Emby

[Heinrich 0]

This process has been rather overwhelming on everything from folder, naming conventions, remote control codes, library two hard drives on the server dying during a spell of hot weather (often happens the first hot week of the year) and metadata tags, external players, but I am making good progress.

 

My setup is Kodi 17.1 on Windows 10 with two WHS 2011 servers. Most of my content is ISO whether it be DVD, Blu-Ray, 3d Blu-Ray and even some HD-DVD (which I think is hopeless and unplayable without converting to another format.)

 

Kodi is working as far as selecting and playing once I start renaming shows and such into the right folders. But I hate the fact that 'watched' status isn't natively synced to other devices and if I hit "watched" on say one episode of Twin Peaks trying to catch everything up, it marks every episode on that disc as watched which may or may not be true.

 

So I installed Emby to play with it. It's talking to Kodi, my iphone, but I haven't paid for unlocking it just yet. I have a pile of questions:

 

1) After installation, playback on primary Kodi PC (17.1 Windows 10) stopped. Everything was freezing. I actually went back and just disabled everything and rebuilt the Kodi libraries. Since playback with Kodi is working great with PowerDVD 16 Ultra as an external player, handling everything I can throw at it (except HD-DVD, which is a seperate topic most likely involving a conversion), I'd like to stick to that for now and just use emby for metadata. Would I select "native" as the library source to accomplish this? And then continue to use the Kodi shortcuts for playing and launching selected video to PowerDVD? 

 

2) Naming conventions look mostly compatible with Kodi as I was converting that now, other than adding bluray to iso movie names (I wish the behavior here could be reversed to assume blu-ray if not specified.) But will specific TV show episodes be listed individually? For example in Twin Peaks Season 1 BluRay disc one ISO on Kodi I get 1-4 listed as 1 Pilot, Pilot, Traces To Nowhere, Zen or the Skill to Catch a Killer, 2 Pilot, Pilot, Traces To Nowhere, Zen or the Skill to Catch a Killer, 3 Pilot, Pilot, Traces To Nowhere, Zen or the Skill to Catch a Killer, 4 Pilot, Pilot, Traces To Nowhere, Zen or the Skill to Catch a Killer. That's just UGLY. I'm hoping with Emby I can get 1 Pilot 2 Pilot 3 Traces To Nowhere 4 Zen or the Skill to Catch a Killer. 

 

3) If I get Emby working as just a metadata engine, with Kodi skins do I use the Kodi shortcuts for TV Shows and Movies or do I have to configure the skin to point to Kodi sources, remembering that I"m not doing Emby playback of any kind.

 

4) Playback isn't working on other PCs. I have a blu-ray spinning on a tab in my browser right now. This is lowest priority so it's at the bottom. Not sure where to start.

 

Sorry for the long email but I have lots of work and understanding ahead of me