KODI goes back a long ways; its roots come from a LINUX port to turn the original XBOX into a set-top-box media player.
mnem
I've desperately tried to become friends with a bunch of those media server apps. And I've failed. They're so dumbed-down that it's impossible to run them if you actually have a bit of understandnig how things work, and more so if your network is not very basic.
For starters, they all run some kind of auto-discovery mechanism, and their devloper has put all his money on it, so there's no override. Consequently, routing is out. I'd like my servers to be on one network, my trusted clients on one, and TV's and similar untrusted crap on a third. No can do. One RFC 1918 network, probably only /24 or classful, that's what the app wants. And woe the person who actually has IPv6 or Heaven forbid, public IP addresses. That is not done.
Then, I've dared to organise my media into directories, by genre and series, et c. And no, the player server does not have write permissions there. Come to think of it, neither has local uid 0. Nor anyone else, without proper authentication. Hell, the files aren't even local to the application server. They just look like that.
I gave up. I just play movies from VLC to the Chromecast, because my computer can read those files just fine.
Edit: spelink