regseb
Casting from self-hosted Invidious bypasses Kodi add-ons, treated as plain network video
Describe the bug
hen casting from my self-hosted Invidious instance with CastKodi, the video is not opened via any Kodi plugin. Instead, Kodi just receives a DASH manifest URL and treats it as a generic network stream.
This means Kodi does not "know" it is an Invidious/YouTube video, and it breaks features that rely on the YouTube/Invidious add-ons.
To Reproduce
- Disable all video add-ons in Kodi (YouTube, Invidious, etc.).
- Cast a video from my own Invidious instance with CastKodi.
- Check
kodi.log: "2025-09-26 10:02:00.099 T:1585 info: JSONRPC Server: New connection added 2025-09-26 10:02:00.932 T:1462 info : VideoPlayer::OpenFile: https://MY_INDIVIDUAL_INVIDIOUS_URL/companion/api/manifest/dash/id/W8SGvZ9A01c"
Kodi opens the DASH URL directly.
Casting from YouTube (youtube.com) works fine, since Kodi opens via the YouTube plugin as expected.
Expected behavior
When casting from Invidious, CastKodi should be able to:
-
Recognize the Invidious URL
-
Offer (or prefer) to open via
plugin://plugin.video.invidious/...if the add-on is installed, instead of only passing a Companion DASH URL. -
Kodi 21.2 / LibreELEC 12 (Raspberry Pi 5)
-
CastKodi version: 7.14
-
Invidious instance: self-hosted (
https://MY_INDIVIDUAL_INVIDIOUS_URL)
Environment
- Cast Kodi version:
- Browser version:
- OS version:
- Kodi version:
- Kodi add-on version (if appropriate):
Question
Is there a way to force CastKodi to use the Invidious plugin instead of treating the video as a raw network stream?
Cast Kodi has scrapers to get video from a page. There are specific scrapers (e.g., for YouTube) and generic scrapers that work on any page. For your Invidious instance, there is no specific scraper. It's a generic scraper that get the video URL from the src attribute (<video><source src="foo"></video>).
The video doesn't play because Kodi may not support videos in DASH format; or the DASH file may be invalid; or your instance may not accept Kodi's connection. You could open an issue in Kodi or Invidious to fix this issue.
To send videos from your Invidious instance to the plugin.video.invidious (lekma), we need to create a scraper. @david-jointech has started development: https://github.com/regseb/castkodi/pull/155#discussion_r2328639248
ok. now i have the full picture. so i am thinking of making a little helper service addon that listens which videos are incoming that can replace a custom domain with "plugin.video.invidious" (or with whatever really...) which would solve this problem. i tried this already in a quick and dirty way and it worked.
on a first glance i did not find such a service. i mean.... it would be even cooler to integrate this into this plugin but i get the whole scope thing :)