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Getting Started

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jbinkley60 edited this page Nov 12, 2023 · 5 revisions

Last updated November 12, 2023

There is a lot of information in this Wiki and it may feel a bit daunting to get started. The goal of this tool, the Mezzmo Kodi addon and Mezzmo itself is to make things as easy as possible to give you your time back to enjoy viewing your media vs. spending all your time managing the tools and infrastructure.

How to begin

Before starting: While the Mezzmo Trailer Checker does its utmost not to interfere with any of your current Mezzmo library database data, it is highly suggested to do a backup before starting and each time you run the tool..


Getting started with the Mezzmo Trailer Checker a fairly simple 5 step process:

  1. Ensure Python 3.x is loaded on the Windows computer which will be running this tool. Python3.x can be found here.
  2. Download the latest version of the Mezzmo Trailer checker from the Releases section of the GitHub page. Look for the Latest Version tag (in this case 0.0.19) and click on the first Zip file in the Assets section. In this case it is mezzmo_trailer_checker_v.0.0.19.zip . The tool is distributed this way because it contains 2 binaries which are required for operation. The binary files are ffmpeg and yt-dlp both for Windows.
  3. Unzip the downloaded release zip file into the folder in which you want to run on your system. It is highly suggested to unzip this file into an empty folder which will only contain the Mezzmo Trailer checker.
  4. Update the config.txt file to fit your environment. The instructions can be found here.
  5. Run the Mezzmo Trailer Checker tool. Instructions can be found here.

Getting help

I am here to help. I volunteered to take over maintaining the Mezzmo Kodi addon and tools like this as a labor of love and a passion to improve UPnP server integration with Kodi and provide a superior media sharing alternative for environments with multiple Kodi / non-Kodi clients. I have tried some of the other solutions and decided to tackle the problem myself to improve my own Kodi experience. I fact, when I began supporting the Mezzmo Kodi addon it only supported a single movie trailer. Now it can support up to 20, including local high quality trailers.

Team Kodi has done a great job adding UPnP capabilities to Kodi and there are a number of other solutions available to share your media with Kodi. However, I found them lacking in features or overly complex and have watched too many people struggle and get frustrated with these solutions. A simple perusing of the Kodi support forums with the number of reported SMB sharing issues, metadata scraper and Kodi database issues will give you an idea of the complexities and challenges.

I will warn you upfront that if you are a longtime Kodi user you will want to think differently about a number of items, especially things like prior limitations of a flat database structure, much greater flexibility on managing your library and thinking about all the new things you can do with your new setup (and free time). Daily I read the Kodi forums and see folks asking questions on whether they can do XYZ with Kodi and some of the other library sharing solutions. The answer is regularly either "No" or "Yes but" whereas the answer most often with Mezzmo and the Mezzmo Kodi addon, is "definitely yes." I believe over time you will agree.

There are two main, one on the Mezzmo forums and the other on the Kodi forums. You can use for either help. I monitor both of them.


Good luck and happy viewing.

Jeff



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