The Kodi foundation is looking to make major changes to how its popular home theater system handles Blu-ray playback, with the aim of making the experience as straightforward as playing a regular media file.
At the moment, Blu-ray support in Kodi involves three less-than-satisfactory options. As the team explains “Kodi can show the Blu-ray menu, with all the navigation overhead; you can ask to play the main movie, and Kodi will just take a guess and play the longest media item on the disc, which may or may not be what you want; or you can go into file view, and wander around until you find that the main movie is labelled as item 636 out of a list of … well, lots.”
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This is obviously all less than ideal, and there are “further implications depending on whether it’s a multi-version disc, an episodic series disc, whether there are extras, and so on”.
Contributor 78andyp, who recently joined the project, is in charge of fixing Kodi’s approach to Blu-rays. His current focus, which was discussed at DevCon 2025, is on simplifying the file view experience, particularly for episodic content. It’s certainly not an easy task and requires a new pull request, weighing in at around 3,000 lines of code, just to start the process.
Although no release timeline for the changes has been announced, or even hinted at — it’s very much a work in progress — the plans sound like a welcome step in the right direction.
In looking to overhaul how Kodi handles Blu-ray playback, the team says a number of side quests are being unearthed. Bonus issues which will need addressing include fixing NFO metadata, improved handling of disc-based library entries, and changing the way Kodi manages episode ranges. The team says these changes could potentially extend to DVDs as well as Blu-rays.
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