Movie Trailers - jbinkley60/MezzmoKodiPlugin GitHub Wiki

Last updated January 14, 2025

Mezzmo locates movie trailers as part of its metadata scraping process. The Mezzmo Kodi addon provides single trailers to the Kodi video information screen for playback. In addition the Mezzmo Kodi addon adds support for displaying and playing up to 20 trailers per movie. These additional trailers are gathered as part of the Mezzmo Kodi addon sync process. Support for multiple trailers is enabled via the Mezzmo Kodi addon settings options. There are 3 options, 0, 10 and 20. 0 is disabled and the default is 10. If the setting is 0 single movie trailers will still be available via the video information view. Note that no other You Tube addons or similar are required for Mezzmo movie trailers. This continues with the theme of no other dependencies.

Single Movie Trailer

Clicking on the trailer button in the video information view will play the first trailer in the list in the Mezzmo properties window for the file.

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Multiple Movie Trailers

When enabled in the Mezzmo Kodi addon settings multiple movie trailers can be access via the context menu for any movie. If the movie has a trailer the Mezzmo context menu will add a menu item called Mezzmo Play Trailers.

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When clicked, a listing of available trailers will be provided for playback. If the trailer has already been watched it will be noted in blue. Note that played tracking is reset each day during the daily sync process and is local to each Kodi client and not shared across clients like movies, TV shows and music files.

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Beginning with versions 1.1.9.1 and 2.1.9.1 improved visibility of trailer information is available leveraging the Enhanced Trailer Information Mezzmo Kodi addon setting. When enabled you will see more information on the trailer type and be able to set specific colors for Local IMDB, Local YouTube and trailers which have been played.

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Note that population of the trailer database is part of the background sync process. When you first install the Mezzmo Kodi addon the trailer database will be empty but will populate as the sync process goes through your Mezzmo server database. You can see the status in the Sync logs and playback of trailers is logged in the general logs.

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Multiple Movie Trailers has seamless support for Mezzmo Movie Collections when you have multiple versions of the same movie in a collection. For instance you might have the regular movie, an extended version, a director's cut and similar in a collection. Within the Mezzmo GUI only one of the movie will show trailer entries, since Mezzmo doesn't allow the exact same trailer to be in the database twice. The Mezzmo Kodi addon Multiple Movie Trailers feature handles this by tracking the IMDB ID for the movies in the collection, which will all be the same since it is the same movie, just different versions. Thus when you select Mezzmo Movie Trailers from the context menu, the same trailers will be displayed, regardless of which movie in the collection you are positioned on. This innovative approach also keeps from duplicating trailer storage space when running local trailers. If you have different movies in a collection then each one will have their own trailers, similar to movies not in a collection.

Local Movie Trailers

Adding movie trailers is automatic with Mezzmo. It will add the You Tube URLs to the media properties when a new movie is discovered. Mezzmo attempts to get a 720P format for the trailer which is a balance of speed and quality. Mezzmo also provides the ability for you to host your own trailers. You night want a higher quality trailer or have a favorite you like. You can also order them how you'd like and the Mezzmo Kodi addon will Kodi will provide the option of playing multiple trailers, if you have the Movie Trailer Count option enabled in the settings. This is something Kodi cannot do natively and typically requires another trailer addon.

To add your own trailers, simply download the trailers and save them where you'd like. They can local files or URLs, if you run a web server. In this example I have added 3 local trailers and left the You Tube trailers for the Mezzmo web interface, which will play them. Note that the Mezzmo web interface cannot play and will not display local trailers from local files but will display and play local trailers if they are URLs hosted on a local web server.

Note If you are using local trailers with Kodi 18.x and your trailer file name contains certain special characters like an "!" or similar you might see a message on those trailers when you export the trailer table using the export utility. The message will say "Mezzmo error decoding local trailer: " This is due to Python 2.x used in Kodi 18 not being able to properly decode the Mezzmo trailer URL. The trailers will still play because Mezzmo is capable of decoding the URL properly, you will just need to look at the Mezzmo properties to see the trailer underlying file name. The error should not occur in Kodi 19 and higher.

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It is recommended to lock your metadata on movies where you have added local trailers. This will avoid the potential of accidentally having Mezzmo rescrape the metadata and overwrite your trailers.

Prefer Local Trailers

If you decide to run local trailers and want to have You Tube trailers for the Mezzmo web interface you end up with a mix of You Tube URLs and local trailer files or URLs in the Mezzmo properties. Normally all of these trailers would get synchronized to Kodi and you run the risk of playing You Tube trailers vs. higher quality local trailers, depending on which trailer you select. The Prefer Local Trailers feature solves that issue by detecting whether a movie has both local and You Tube trailers. If it detects both and the Prefer Local Trailers setting is enabled (Default setting is enabled) the Mezzmo Kodi addon will only synchronize the local trailers to Kodi. If it detects You Tube trailers for a movie but there are no local trailers detected then the You Tube trailers will be synchronized to Kodi. If the Prefer Local Trailers setting is disabled then all trailers are synchronized to Kodi. You can always export the Trailers table from your Kodi instance to see what trailers are in your Kodi database.

Mezzmo Trailer Checker

Mezzmo Trailer Checker is a tool designed to help you manage the local trailers capabilities of Mezzmo. This tool communicates with your Mezzmo server, determines which movies have local trailers, downloads missing local trailers and will update the Mezzmo database with new local trailers. Powerful Kodi addons like the Mezzmo Kodi addon will then sync the new trailer information to all Kodi clients via its sync process.

Click here to find out more about how it works.

Key Features

  • Read current You Tube movie trailer information from the Mezzmo database
  • Movie trailers can be fetched by newest, oldest, movie name or movie number
  • Track movies which have local trailers, which don't and last checked time
  • Download high quality trailers from You Tube for local playback with daily limit setting
  • Automatically normalize and trim the You Tube trailers names
  • Detect You Tube trailers which cannot be downloaded and marks them "Bad"
  • Automatically remove bad trailers from Mezzmo
  • User selectable feature of 480P, 720P or 1080P quality trailers (if available, otherwise best quality available)
  • Option to set the maximum duration of trailers
  • Automatically move trailers to designated location (i.e. NAS, local disk etc.)
  • Option for automatically locking the Mezzmo metadata to avoid overriding trailer information
  • Option for how many movies to check in each batch run of the Mezzmo Trailer Checker
  • Option to limit how many trailers per movie
  • Option to order trailers by size
  • Option to prefer official trailers
  • Option for local trailers only
  • Option for supporting prefer local trailers capability to allow You Tube trailers for Mezzmo web interface
  • Check feature to update trailer size, resolution and duration after manual trailer changes
  • Added checks for missing trailer files and trailer files with invalid names
  • Full detailed logfile
  • Full Trailer checker statistics
  • CSV Export of trailer information, checker history and movies in the Mezzmo Db without trailers.
  • Command line backups of Mezzmo Trailer Checker database
  • User ability to clear trailer information by movie name or database number

Mezzmo Movie Previews

Mezzmo Movie Previews is a feature that is available with versions 2.1.8.7 / 2.1.8.7 and higher that is designed to provide a theater like experience with your Mezzmo / Kodi library. It is accessed via the normal Mezzmo context menu:

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When launched the Mezzmo Movie Previews feature will play movie trailers prior to the movie you selected, to simulate a theater like experience. You have full control of which trailers, how many and more are played with the Trailer Addon Settings. It is highly suggested to use local trailers with the Prefer Local Trailers feature and use the Mezzmo Trailer Checker to help manage your Mezzmo / Kodi trailers.

Key features of Mezzmo Movie Previews

  • Number of previews to play (1-6)
  • Option to prefer local trailers to only play local high quality trailers vs. You Tube
  • Previews from the year the movie was released to recreate the original movie experience
  • Previews from the current year with a playcount of 0 in your library for a modern previews experience of unwatched movies
  • Specific trailers will only be played once a day to avoid repeating
  • Automatic start of the main feature movie after the previews
  • Available in both native and GUI modes

Mezzmo Movie Preview Notes

  • When you first install the Mezzmo Kodi addon or upgrade to versions 1.1.8.7 / 2.1.8.7 the Mezzmo Movie Previews feature will not work and you will get a message stating that no trailers were found and the main movie is starting. This is because the Mezzmo Movie Previews feature needs information from Mezzmo like the release year of the movie and such. This will get updated during the daily sync process or you can initiate a manual on demand full sync. New movies added to Mezzmo will update the trailer database as they are added and then sync'd with Kodi.
  • If you are not running local trailers but have prefer local trailers enabled, you will encounter the same situation as above. This is because the addon is setup to prefer local trailers but none were found. If you disable prefer local trailers the Mezzmo Movie Previews will operate but with You Tube trailers. This will work but is unlikely to be an optimal experience.