For a few years now, I’ve been running a Kodi setup on various Raspberry Pi’s to live behind my telly. Currently on RPi 3, and OSMC is my distro of choice (clean, simple, smooth, and fast!). One plugin came to my attention which I found to be marvelous, called Cinema Experience. And I’ve managed to tailor it further to my needs through some BASH script magic…
Either read on, or click the pic to see the GitHub notabug repo.
To summarize the function of Cinema Experience – when you start a movie with this plugin it will stick a load of videos at the top of the playlist, showing “Coming Attractions”, movie trailers, “Please turn off your phone”, the BBFC ratings card, the demo video of the sound type used (think those THX intros at the cinema) – all the kind of leaders you get in a cinema. You can even tie it into your home automation system to automatically close your curtains and dim the lights! It’s wonderful!
As standard, it will just grab any old trailer from an online source, with a rating suitable to the film you are watching (if your library contains rating information). This is all well and good, but having these “Coming Attractions” shown before my film was pointless 9 times out of 10 as it would show me films I don’t own and have no interest in watching. Luckily, one of the options is to play trailers from a local directory.
With that in mind, I knocked up a little bash script (which you can find here) that pulls a list of movie titles out of your Kodi database, checks if a trailer already exists, and if not it’ll searche youtube for a trailer & download it to local storage. It will even have some console output to let you know which films it couldn’t find. Setup a cron job to run the script at 0400 every day, and Bob’s your uncle!
So now, when I start a film with Cinema Experience it will only show trailers for films that are available in my local database. Which absolutely rocks, and often reminds me of cool films I have that I haven’t watched yet!
Although I made this ages ago now, I’ve only just realized I’ve hardly told anyone. Feel free to download, and improve your viewing experience!
For the Kodi hardcore, yes I know Cinema Experience has been superseded by CinemaVision, but Cinema Experience works for me. I may think of “upgrading” soon, but why fix what ain’t broken?
Update
Slight update to links, as I have now moved away from GitHub due to their acquisition by Microsoft. My code is now being hosted on notabug.org