Kodi stopped updating movie information because TMDB blocked access to Russian users

Kodi is a free-code multimedia center that also allows you to present all local movie files as your own home theater with descriptions and posters. Kodi has become for me an analogue of a set-top box of any telecom operator, only without a monthly fee and with the ability to work without the Internet.

The Movie Database (TMDB) is a popular user-editable movie and TV series database that contains most movie descriptions and covers in Russian.

With help your Kodi parser can get information from the file name, and then download all descriptions from TMDB and format as in the screenshot below.

The blocking of access for users from Russia to TMDB occurred around April 2022, but I’m dealing with this now, because it has only become relevant for me now, and I didn’t find a specific solution to the problem of kodi not downloading covers, I didn’t find a scraper.

TL;DR

Solution: edit hosts, a text file that contains domain data and their IP address\\192.168.XXX.XXX\Configfiles\hosts.conf:

108.157.4.61 themoviedb.org
65.9.49.79 www.themoviedb.org
108.157.4.61 api.themoviedb.org
89.187.169.39 image.tmdb.org

Access Kodi over the network

Make sure both computers are on the same local network and then determine the IP address of the Kodi computer. In my case this \\192.168.165.7\for Windows or smb://192.168.165.7/ for Linux.
You can check the IP address of Kodi on your router or on the Connections tab.

On the computer you want to access from, open File Explorer or File Manager and select “Network”. Select the target Kodi computer from the list of devices on the network and connect to it using its IP address. Now you can view and manipulate files on the target computer.

Find the hosts.conf file

hosts.conf is a configuration file for the Domain Name Management System (DNS). It contains a list of associations between domain names and IP addresses. In this case, we will use it to override access to TMDB at the system level.

Edit hoststext file \\192.168.XXX.XXX\Configfiles\hosts.confby adding the following entries to it:

108.157.4.61 themoviedb.org
65.9.49.79 www.themoviedb.org
108.157.4.61 api.themoviedb.org
89.187.169.39 image.tmdb.org

Set up a regular Kodi scraper

Install the scraper plugin. You can find scraper plugins in the official Kodi repository or third-party sources.

Set up the scraper plugin. Specify which sources of information you want to use (IMDb, TMDb or others). IMDb has a problem that not all descriptions are in Russian.

Select the content type for your folder and set up the scraper. Universal Movie Scraper has a lot of settings, so you can choose some other one.

Configuring Add-on:Universal Movie Scraper

Test the scraper with a mandatory restart of Kodi

Scan the files in your library. The scraper will use information from selected sources to match movies with their metadata.

View information about movies in Kodi. Metadata such as title, release year, genres, actors, description, and poster will be available in your library after the update.

After rebooting, Kodi will download information with the title and actors, but not the cover art. Covers with Russian titles are downloaded only after another reboot.