I am tired of Kodi's speed issues all the time. Everything I read states that it's a problem communicating to online data sources. I want my library's metadata to be completly local to negate this issue. I use strm files that utilize a scraper, but I don't believe that makes a difference for the kodi library and metadata. The only difference is when you try to play it. Instead of playing a local file, it uses whatever scraper addon you have. The speed issues I'm seeing are not necessarily related to this.

I am using MCM on Windows 10 with a local copy of my movies folder (400 or so movies). I used MCM to download all metadata for the library successfully. I had the "Generate Kodi/XMBC compatible metadata (.nfo)" setting turned on.

I did a fresh install of Kodi, put my pc in airplane mode and added the local movie folder with all the MCM downloaded metadata. It adds the movies, but I see absolutely no artwork, posters, etc... I see nothing but movie names. Any ideas? Also, any alternate ideas on fixing Kodi speed issues would be appreciated as well. Thanks

As soon as I enable wifi and start Kodi all posters appear. When I look at the nfo file created by MCM, it's filled with online links to the artwork on tmdb. Why would these links be in this file if I've downloaded all metadata locally? Doesn't this negate the purpose of downloading the metadata?

Looks like this is by design I think. Pete, the developer, said in other posts that Kodi doesn't support local file links in the NFO file. Doesn't make any sense to me, but whatever. What it does do if I understand correctly, is it caches the pics/data it downloads the first time it downloads it so it is stored and referenced locally from that point on. Is this true? If so, is there ANY benefit to downloading metadata through MCM and adding libraries in Kodi set to use local data only?

Any help on the question about the benefit of local metadata in last post would greately be appreciated. Thanks

Not a Kodi user, but their knowledge base local artwork takes priority. So I would ask them why it is not happening. But yes it may come back to urls in the nfo file but I honestly can not say.

Kodi definitely supports local NFO files--I have always used local files. Well, I'm still using an older version because I have it set up the way I want--nice and simple. I'm sure they would not have removed the ability--that would screw everyone who has been using Kodi for years and built large libraries.

MCM allows you to specify a local directory to download artwork to and it does so very well. However, I submitted a bug report in January 2020 about the links in the NFO changing from the local drive to a tmdb URL. I have been editing the NFO files to use my local art directory since. Every once in a while the local link in the NFO file is created correctly as I have it set up; most times it links to tmdb.

If you have KODI set to use local NFO files in your source, it will pull from the local files or it will pull from the tmdb URL as long as you have internet access. When KODI scrapes, it creates its own set of thumbnails in the Kodi subdirectory in your %USER% directory. It then uses those thumbnails in all future displays.

The only reason I can see where your artwork doesn't show unless you enable wifi is that you have not set your movie sources and scanned the movies into Kodi's library. If you set your sources but don't scan, you can still see your movies in some menus. Kodi will pull the art location from the NFO file, however in the case of having a tmdb url in the NFO, you must be connected to the internet for the artwork to display.

Edit: Make sure you backup your artwork and movie directories (yes, I have backups for every drive I have movies or TV Shows on--currently 16 movie drives and 9 TV show drives ranging from 3TB to 8TB). I made the mistake early on and lost a lot of artwork and edited NFO files where I added genres like Christmas or Epic. I had to start all over again re-creating my NFO files so that I could get missing actor photos and add genres. That was fine until the bug I reported in January 2020. I would hate to have to edit NFO files for over 4,000 movies with how the information is populated now.