📚 The Library on Trakt: What It Is and Where It’s Going

[CajunRob]

@kcador

Yeah, the API still has routes and documentation mentioning “collection”, this is just to not break every integration out there.

@CajunRob

Precisely how is Trakt going to determine what I have access to in the way of digital files? I have digital movies and tv series that aren’t on my Plex server, or some of the streaming sites that syncing is possible from. So unless manual addition to the Library remains a thing, this will be an absolute dealbreaker.

If you can press a Play button from Trakt to start watching something somewhere, it belongs in the future Library.
If it doesn’t, it can live in a list, you can even have a list for each service you have it on and notes for everything.

@CajunRob

My bigger question besides the limiting yet again of how paying customers use the website is one of privacy here.

What is your fear in privacy exactly? You can have a private list if you want to keep something private.

Well the issue of being able to press play to determine whether it is in the Library is somewhat strange then. Like I mentioned, for those of us using a TV to watch that basically negates you considering a digital file as being in our library. That’s a limitation because for example Roku doesn’t allow cross app linking.

One thing that I’ve noticed as I am going through my list of collected items in my library is that Trakt appears to be classifying digital items as BluRay after syncing from Plex. I’m not sure whether this is because it’s picking up the source from the filenames used or what. But surely anything synced from Plex should automatically be considered digital, no? Even if it isn’t necessarily playable because of App permissions. It also seems to me that much of the reliance of being “playable” from some site is based on Justwatch finding where (if anywhere) something is currently able to be streamed. That negates anything we might have purchased digitally or own through a service already.

The Privacy concern I mentioned I expanded on in a second response. Your move going forward seems to require permission for Trakt to access streaming accounts we have. That’s a lot of faith tbh for users to put into Trakt. Especially with accounts like Amazon that could be used to purchase items, or Apple that could compromise devices.

Maybe a clearer explanation of what the end goal is and how Trakt envisions this working would be better.

Because right now some things just don’t seem very well thought out.

ETA. After downloading the CSV files for my Library, I can now definitely see that anything imported from Plex that had the source of the file set as a BluRay in the filename (e.g. move.title.year.BluRay.resolution.audio codec.video codec) is currently being tagged as Media type=1 in the watch list instead of media type=0). Unfortunately from what I can see there’s no way of uploading an edited version of the Library to accurately fix the items to be correctly displayed. Am I honestly expected to manually one by one edit >1000 items?