Are you seeing only trailers in Kodi when you click on and try to stream a movie using addons like Covenant, Exodus, Elysium, and others? Read below on why this happens and how to fix!
Are you seeing only trailers in Kodi when you go to watch a movie? Commonly, this is happening while using multi-source addons such as Covenant, Exodus, or Elysium, where streams are scraped from a wide variety of public websites on the internet.
Commonly, users have reported seeing this when looking for a movie that is in the “In Theatres” category of each addon.
First off, you must remember or learn that Kodi addons do not store any content. Covenant and others simply scrape the public internet and return video files (.mp4 or .avi or example) whose name matches a specific criteria. Getting mad at the addon or developer is pointless, since they have no control over this content.
Next, you must learn or understand how movie streams work. A crystal-clear HD stream of a movie is NOT available the same week it comes out in theatres. At best, a blurry CAM streams may leak out, but lots of public websites don’t even choose to host these files because the audio and video are unwatchable.
This is why you see only trailers in Kodi when using the In Theatres category of the addon. These movies are new to theatres and there are no streams available.
HD movies streams are generally available 2 weeks before the public Blu-Ray/DVD release date, which is when iTunes gets digital copies of each addon.
There are always exceptions to the above statement, but if you aren’t tech-savvy enough to understand how movie streams leak or how Oscar screeners work, for example, it’s easiest to just follow the bolded part above.
So, back to the original point of seeing only trailers in Kodi. Because new releases don’t have any streams yet, public websites store the trailer as a placeholder until the full thing comes out. Kodi addons don’t know any better, so they happily queue up and play the trailer for you when you ask.
But why do I see only trailers in Kodi for older movies?
On occasion, you may also see only trailers in Kodi for an older movie that IS available on Blu-Ray/DVD. Movie companies are becoming more vigilant in taking down streaming files from the internet, but trailers aren’t taken down because there is no streaming grey area with this files.
So, every once in a while you might see that a real movie stream have been taken down and the trailer stream is the only thing left available.
You can increase the selection of streams pulled in by Covenant off the internet by getting a Real-Debrid account.
If this still bugs you, you can always disable the scrapers that store movie trailers so that these websites never return any links. We’ve seen the following scrapers return only trailers in Kodi:
To disable these scrapers, launch Covenant and navigate to Tools > Providers and disable the websites above.