Set up Direct Paths

Your Media needs to be accessible!

Your movies and TV shows need to be directly accessible to Kodi to use direct paths.

1. Setup directories shared over SMB (typically, but any network protocol supported by Kodi should work, like NFS) on the server where your media lies (this might not be where your Plex Media Server is):
   • See here for Windows,
   • here for Mac
     • Beware that you cannot use characters like \:*?"<>| in path or file names when SMB is used
   • and here for Linux
     • Beware that you cannot use characters like \:*?"<>| in path or file names when SMB is used
2. Check that your media is indeed accessible to Kodi:
   • In Kodi, start adding a Video source following this guide from step 1 to 6 only - NOT to the end!
   • If you manage to navigate to your media, it is indeed accessible to Kodi
   • Hit Cancel in step 6
3. Your path additionally needs to be explicitly listed in sources.xml! If all your media resides e.g. on smb://server, then your sources.xml needs to have a specific entry (see code snippet below). There is no need to have an entry per Plex library or per sub-folder. To let PKC help you with that, navigate to the PKC settings Advanced section, then Set network credentials for Direct Paths and direct play

<sources>
    ...
    <files>
        <default pathversion="1"></default>
        <source>
            <name>PKC example entry for server</name>
            <path pathversion="1">smb://server/</path>
            <allowsharing>true</allowsharing>
        </source>
    </files>
    ...
</sources>

Example xml entry for server. See the Kodi wiki for more info

If this doesn't work for you, then direct paths won't work for you!

If you managed to access your media on the LAN with Kodi, you now have two possible ways to setup direct paths:

• Option 1: let PKC substitute paths (works 90% of the time)
• Option 2: substitute paths on the PMS (works 100% of the time)