How To Add Genesis Content To Your Kodi Library

One of my favorite features of Kodi is the ability to customize the look and appearance of it. I’m fortunate enough to have a large backup of media to sync into my library that displays the folders and fanart I’ve manually setup over the years. For many users of Kodi though this isn’t possible. A lot of end users use the box for streaming media forcing you to manually enter the plugin screen itself and scroll through menus upon menus. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to add streaming content into the movies and TV shows section of Kodi? Well, with the Genesis addon we can accomplish just that.

Here’s What You Need To Know

I’m going to assume you’ve already got Kodi installed and have taken the time to watch my tutorial on how to setup and install Fusion for Kodi. From there all you really need to do is install the Genesis plugin which you can do by using the program installer from Fusion. Inside of the addon you should find the easy capability to install Genesis, if not feel free to drop a comment below and I’ll gladly guide you in the right direction.

That’s really all you need for an initial setup. There are a few things we need to tweak in order for this to work so let’s get started.

Steps to take to integrate Genesis Content into Kodi

If you’ve met all the requirements above then it’s time to get started. First things first, open Kodi and follow these steps. By default Kodi hides important files to the end user to prevent bad things from happening but in order to make this work we’re going to have to change that…don’t worry you won’t damage your Kodi install.

Show Hidden Files in Kodi

• Open Kodi and scroll to SYSTEM, and then the SETTINGS sub menu.
• From here we need to scroll down to FILE LISTS and make sure “SHOW HIDDEN FILES AND DIRECTORIES” is highlighted (make sure the blue circle is there).
• Once complete return to the Kodi main menu.

Adding Some Initial Genesis Content to the Kodi Library
From here we’ll add a couple of the movies or TV shows to our Genesis library. The reason we’re doing this is to make sure when we do our configuration we will see some content in our Userdata folders. Some people in the past have had trouble adding the movie and tv shows folders because they didn’t show because there was no content. Doing this just eliminated any potential headaches.

• Go to VIDEOS and choose ADDONS, from here open the GENESIS plugin.
• We’ll need to do this twice so let’s start with movies. Select MOVIES from the Genesis home screen.
• Choose any category if you’d like. For this tutorial we’ll choose MOST POPULAR.
• Inside you should see a bunch of movies. Highlight one of these movies and press the letter “C” to bring up the context menu. If you’re not on a computer with a keyboard you should have some way to open the context menu. For Fire TV’s it’s as simple as using the remotes menu button. Tablets you should be able to long press.
• When the context menu arrives you should see the “ADD TO LIBRARY” option in it. Highlight it and press enter.
• You should see an indication in the bottom right corner (or wherever your indications show) saying it was successfully added.
• Now do the same thing but this time go into TV SHOWS.

You can add as many as movies and TV shows as you want from the step above. It’s best in my opinion to add one for both first and test to make sure it works.

Now it’s time to point Genesis Addon to the Kodi Library
Now it’s time to make the magic happen. Go back to the home screen and go to VIDEOS once more. This time we want to select the FILES sub menu option. You should see the screen with “Files, Playlists” and Video Add-ons”, we want to select “Files”.

• You should now see an option to “ADD VIDEOS”, select it.
• The Add Video Source screen should show up, from here we want to select BROWSE.
• From here you might have to use your head a little as every device probably will provide a different structure. The biggest problem I had was using a different theme while trying to set this up. To make this as easiest as possible use the default Kodi theme Confluence. I will try to explain each OS as follows:
• FOR WINDOWS: You should be able to simply select the HOME FOLDER and it should take you directly to where we want to be.
• From here all you should have to do is select “USERDATA”, then “ADDON_DATA”, then “plugin.video.genesis”.
• If you’ve added shows or movies from one of our previous steps you should see the folders labelled Movies and TV Shows. For now select MOVIES and click OK.
• You can give it another name instead of Movies. Because I have movies coming from my personal library I typically name these folders Genesis Movies.
• After you’ve named it click OK.
• Now we just need to set the content. In this case it’s movies so we want to make sure that under “This Directory Contains” we select Movies.
• Simply click OK and choose YES to refresh your paths.
• Now rinse and repeat this to add TV Shows.
• FOR MAC: When I did this on Mac I had a few more steps to find the userdata folder but the process is basically the same.
• Select the Home Folder option.
• From here we want to go to LIBRARY
• Then we want to select APPLICATION SUPPORT
• Select the folder KODI
• Choose the USERDATA folder
• Then the ADDON_DATA folder
• Choose “plugin.video.genesis”
• You should see folders labelled Movies and TV Shows. We’ll setup Movies first. Select Movies and you should see the ones you added to the library in an earlier step. From here all you have to do is click OK.
• Give it a name (or leave as is) of Genesis Movies. and click OK
• Set the content. Under “This Directory Contains” we choose Movies.
• We’re done! Click OK and choose YES if it asks to refresh your paths.
• Do this again but instead of Movies choose TV Shows.
• FOR ANDROID: Because every device using Android may provide a different file system I’m going to base it off my favorite device, the Amazon Fire TV. Like MAC this one will take a little more navigating to find the userdata folder.
• There is no HOME FOLDER on my Android device, instead I had to choose “EXTERNAL STORAGE”.
• From the external storage I went to “ANDROID”.
• From here I selected “DATA”.
• Then the install folder of “org.xbmc.kodi”
• Then “files”
• Followed by “.kodi”
• From here it’s no different then any other OS. We want to select USERDATA
• Then the ADDON_DATA folder
• Choose “plugin.video.genesis”
• You should see folders labelled Movies and TV Shows. We’ll setup Movies first. Select Movies and you should see the ones you added to the library in an earlier step. From here all you have to do is click OK.
• Give it a name (or leave as is) of Genesis Movies. and click OK
• Set the content. Under “This Directory Contains” we choose Movies.
• We’re done! Click OK and choose YES if it asks to refresh your paths.
• Do this again but instead of Movies choose TV Shows.

Wrapping Up

That’s all you should need to do to complete this. Once you’ve added the steps above you should be able to browse to TV Shows or Movies from your Kodi home screen and see the ones you’ve added to your library. To add more simply go back into Genesis and find the shows or movies you want to watch and add them to your library. While some might not think this is a necessity it sure is a nice feature. Being able to browse to my favorite shows through the Movies and TV Shows menu helps limit the amount of clicks I have to do. I simply open it, find my favorite show, click it and then choose a source.

Hope you enjoy the tutorial, I’ll be adding more in the coming days/weeks. If you have any problems please feel free to drop a comment.