Direct Play

What is Direct Play?

Also check out the Plex article on Direct Play and Direct Stream

• When using Direct Play, Kodi will use a path like smb://myNas/movies/Inception_(2010)_720p.mkv to play media
  • Starting a movie is much faster than using Direct Streaming and almost as fast as using Direct Paths
  • Kodi knows the video's exact filename and path, which is useful for 3rd party Kodi plugins (e.g. subtitle download)
• If the path is not accessible to Kodi, PKC will fall back to HTTP Direct Streaming and use paths like https://192.168.1.2:32400/library/parts/987.mkv
• If the media to play has higher quality than you specified under Playback in the settings, the Plex server will transcode the video down to the quality you chose. Or you can choose to force transcode.
  • Transcoding can be useful if you have low network bandwidth and playback gets stuck frequently

How to set everything up

Follow the guide for Direct Paths to set-up the Plex libraries to point to a path that is accessible for Kodi. Then do the following:

• Choose Addon (default) as playback method in the settings under Sync Options, if you have not already done so
• Choose Direct Play (default) under Prefered playback method in the settings
• Check with the Kodi On-Screen Video Diagnostics that you were successful. This is the o key by default