Playonkodi NPM

play-on-kodi

Stream your local/network content directly on Kodi without having to setup FTP, SMB or anything else.

Installation

$ npm install -g playonkodi

For superhero devs:

$ git clone https://github.com/ritiek/play-on-kodi
$ cd play-on-kodi
$ npm install -g .

Also make sure you have youtube-dl installed.

Usage

usage: playonkodi.js [-h] [-v] -s SERVER -p PORT [-i INTERFACE_IP] MEDIA

Stream your local/network content directly on Kodi.

Positional arguments:
  MEDIA                 Path to media file

Optional arguments:
  -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.
  -v, --version         Show program's version number and exit.
  -s SERVER, --server SERVER
                        Kodi's local ip address
  -p PORT, --port PORT  Kodi's web interface port
  -i INTERFACE_IP, --interface-ip INTERFACE_IP
                        [Optional] Interface IP to send to Kodi server

Examples

Stream a local video to Kodi

$ playonkodi -s 192.168.0.108 -p 6050 /path/to/local/media/file

Stream a video from the internet to Kodi

$ playonkodi -s 192.168.0.108 -p 6050 http://path/to/media

Since this tool now uses the youtube-dl backend to resolve URLs, so you should be able to media content from most websites (including YouTube, HotStar, and many more). Just pass the URL, and you'll know if it plays on Kodi.

Send local IP address to Kodi server manually (useful if script cannot find out the correct network interface IP automatically)

$ playonkodi -s 192.168.0.108 -p 6050 -i 192.168.0.105 /path/to/local/media/file

Loading External Subtitles

There maybe cases where you would want to link your local media content with external subtitles (.srt, etc.). Due to a limitation in Kodi, we cannot do that for you automatically (check out issue #3).

However you can install mkvtoolnix ($ sudo apt install mkvtoolnix) to embed external subtitles in the container itself and pass this new container to Kodi.

For example:

$ mkvmerge -o output.mkv input.mp4 subtitles.srt
$ playonkodi -s 192.168.0.108 -p 6050 output.mkv

How it works?

For local media, it makes your media content available locally to the devices on the same network. Otherwise it just uses youtube-dl to resolve the passed URL.
It then attempts to figure out your PC's local IP address.
And lastly, it makes a network request to Kodi's jsonrpc server to play the hosted media content.

Contributing

This tool is supposed is supposed to be very minimal way to play local and network files on Kodi. I made it to quickly be able to your local media content to Kodi server. You don't want to setup FTP/SMB (if not already), add it as a network source on Kodi and locate the media to just make the thing play!
If you believe your idea is simple and interesting at the same time, please open an issue or send a PR!