We’ve read through your feedback in our first announcement. 27 of you took the time to explain how you use your Library, especially for physical media, and that context matters.
What we heard
Logging your Physical Library (DVD, Blu-ray, etc.) is important.
And more specifically: you want it mixed with your Digital / Playable Library, not separated into Lists.
That’s clear.
What’s changing
Physical Library entries will continue to live inside your main Library.
There is no migration to Lists required.
You will keep:
The same sorting behavior
The same filtering behavior
The same overall Library experience
Nothing changes there.
What will change
To keep the Library consistent and meaningful long term, Physical entries will require at least two metadata fields:
Format (DVD, Blu-ray,…)
Resolution
An entry without these will not be considered a valid Physical Library item going forward.
This helps:
Prevent ambiguous entries
Keep filtering reliable
Ensure the Library remains useful at scale
Future Enforcement
In future updates:
All entry points (web, iOS, Android and third-party integration) will require these two metadata fields.
You are already able today to export any entries that don’t comply with this rule: filter on “No Format” and “No Resolution”, then “CSV Export”.
If you’re not relying on metadata-based filtering or sorting, we still recommend using a List instead, it won’t change your experience either way.
The Library will continue to support both Digital and Physical media.
We’re simply adding clearer structure so the feature can scale properly and remain powerful over time.
We appreciate the pushback. It helped clarify what actually matters to you.
What I am referring to is if you go to the new website, the Library is now broken down into 2 sections. Or at least it is for me. There’s a Plex library and a Custom. When Plex Sync shits the bed like it does weekly and I manually add the skipped items, they end up going into the Custom Library not Plex (you have NO control over this). Even if that’s where they are located. It’s absolutely absurd for Trakt to split a library like this. And besides the manually added items, anything with the name Blu-Ray or DVD in the filename has been moved into my Custom Library.
To clarify what’s in my Library: it contains digital files ripped / encoded / remuxed from physical items I own and are accessible to me through my Plex Library and digital files of tv recordings, owned media, purchased and downloaded media, etc.
Oh I understand Plex isn’t used by everyone, but it’s a “perk” for VIP users here and I’d hazard a guess probably something many used as a determining decision to pay for VIP.
Under it’s older guise of the Webhook it worked 98% of the time. It would fail occasionally if adding numerous new episodes at the same time, but was then easy to keep track of because you’d see rare missed added items to the Library.
With the new Plex Sync which has been in Beta for a while now with numerous complaints and unaddressed issues, it becomes a hassle tbh. You have to review when it last decided to sync (supposed to be hourly but mine hasn’t done anything since Feb 11 at 07:41), then review which items it added in the Sync and locate missed additions from the Plex Library (because there’s no visible notation on V3 website) or try to do a manual sync which 9 times out of 10 fails to do anything. And like I pointed out, that places the newly added items into a separate Library section.
Might not seem like a big bother, except (a) it means I have to peruse 2 Libraries to see if I have something I want to watch, and (b) with the planned future of Trakt being something where playing your digitally owned items becomes a one-click action from Trakt, it means that there will be gaps because some tv series’ episodes etc are in a Library section Trakt believes are unplayable…
Frankly for me the only reason to pay for Trakt is the automated syncing. If I have to manually fix and log additions to my Library, I might as well use Letterboxed, or similar. Or frankly the main 5 letter all caps competitor to Trakt where I could just keep a manual list of the items titled “Library” or “Owned”. And I’d gain a far better UI than V3.
Rant over and thanks for listening to my Ted Talk. Have a great evening.
Thank you @kcador! That seems genuinely the first great news I heard from trakt in a long time regarding all these changes. This one is pretty critical.
Few notes, remarks and bug reports, I’m tinkerling with the library/collection, checking my medias and trying to do some csv exports.
Exporting 10’000 episodes works, couple movies works but when I’m trying to export 4’000 movies, I get a Server Error (500). Usually it worked, hope it’s just temporary.
Exporting to csv, when it works, the metadata columns are never populated, since forever I think, never reported the bug.
Example with my movies or my episodes library,
media_type → 0 (= digital ?)
resolution → always empty
3d → FALSE (only have 2D on my side)
hdr (only have SDR on my side so empty)
audio → have the channels count and not the audio codec
audio_channels → always empty
media_type
resolution
3d
hdr
audio
audio_channels
0
FALSE
11
0
FALSE
3
0
FALSE
6
0
FALSE
3
0
FALSE
6
Is it a normal behavior?
It would be great to have all the data as it’s useful to extract to Excel and do some filtering, sorting and math/pivot on our data.
Lastly, I have a weird bug, I’m trying to see if it’s on trakt side. On ~4’000 movies, I have ~16 of them that appear when I filter by No Resolution, No Audio Codec, No Audio Channels. but if I check all these movies/entries they have the metadata.
Digital 1080p
Flac 2.0
or
Digital 1080p
Dolby Digital+ 7.1
Trying to figure out what’s the problem here. Fixed by removing items from library and re-adding them from jellyfin/trakt, didn’t come again.
Thank you. This is one of the few times in recent months where it feels like you really did listen to what users were telling you and adjusted course to find a way that lets people keep functionality that is important to them. This helps to rebuild trust in the platform’s relationship with its userbase and I hope you keep at it.
I think this compromise to require metadata in a feature like this makes sense and I’m happy to add it where I have previously neglected to do so.
BUT, there is one problem preventing me from doing so: The 100 item limit for the collection (the error message still refers to it as such) apparently also prevents people from updating existing entries. This prevents anyone who hit that limit from updating metadata in the library to align with this new requirement and should be fixed.
I already have over 4000 items in my library. I don’t understand what happens with them. Are they just assumed to be digital access unless I manually modify them, or will I need to go through every entry and specify digital or physical? Or is this metadata requirement only going to affect things going forward? I just don’t understand that aspect.
I actually don’t think I’ve ever used collection/library for digital items. I have no interest in buying things digitally, since you can’t own anything you “buy” that way and it’s lower quality. So I believe I’ve only used the feature exclusively for physical purchases.
Physical media is very important to me, so thank you for listening to feedback! I logged in to the forum to see what was the state of things since I was last online and just about had a heart attack. I have 3,000+ items in my library(Physically) I was going to have to look elsewhere with my VIP coming up for renewal in a couple of days. I decided I will stick around to see where you will take things and went ahead with renewal due to how this was handled.
I second this!
Good question! I marked all my library with metadata when I added them originally, but how will this affect items that you do not add metadata to now and in the future?
Also, why do we have to specify a resolution when it comes to discs? Blu-rays (including 3D) are 1080p and UHD Blu-rays are 4K. That should be automatic.
That’s mostly true but not always, I have a few Asterix movies on blu-ray that are 720p. Blu-ray discs are also sometimes used to store more episodes on 1 disc at lower resolutions, the blu-ray for Special Rescue Police Winspector is in 480p with 49 episodes on 1 disc.
I do agree it should be an automatic selection though and just let us change it in these rare occasions it isn’t 1080p or 4K
Hopefully I can mention it here, as it is a competitor to Trakt’s library system but nothing else Trakt does so hopefully it’s fine. I use blu-ray.com which gives you detailed information about physical media, their app (My Movies) even allows you to scan the barcode in instead of trying to search for it.
This is why it would be so helpful if we could edit the csv/JSON files on our home computers to edit / add the metadata and then re-upload them to fix our libraries.
Why does it have to be required to choose a format and resolution? I add lots of things to my library almost daily, but I don’t care about what format they are, I just like knowing what I already have. It was a lot easier to just click the add right now button without having to add any extra stuff.
This first step of requiring to choose a format and resolution has been pushed on Trakt V2. We are going to monitor the impact of this change over the next weeks.
This is important because it makes the Library structured enough to be really useful as a list of items you own and intentionally mark as such. This requirement enables better filtering, sorting, and future improvements. Without this, the Library would just be an easy to access List. And this is something we want to avoid given the underlying data structure of the Library. But it could be a good feature idea for List management.
Will this change result in items being moved from the split Libraries I’ve ended up with? In other words, if I adjust a digital file that is incorrectly being tagged as a BluRay by the metadata import of a Plex Sync because it contains the words “BluRay” from BluRay to Digital, will it then move it over / back to where it should be?
Thanks for the info. First time I was hearing of this. I just wanted a simple one click option, I don’t have time for lists or import/export. I will cancel the VIP and seek external alternatives. Thanks for the memories!
PLEASE add an option for default format and resolution. Adding a default value for these two fields will solve a lot of issues with this process. Thanks, T
edit: but ya adding 5 clicks to a 1 click process would seem to be a huge programming no-no…
Hello, I have over 3,000 films in my library, which I’m already taking the time to add to by format, but resolution isn’t important to me. If I understand correctly, my library doesn’t meet your strict criteria, so it’s going to disappear? Become unusable? Thank you for your answers.
I agree with everyone here; if something works, there’s no reason to change it.
For several weeks now, I’ve been regularly checking the latest Trakt updates, and I find the direction you’re taking very worrying. The new Android app has really lost fluidity and functionality; listing them all here would be far too long. I’ve given up on using it and am sticking with the old version of the website. I always expect to see it disappear any day now in favor of the horrible new version. I really hope you are working on restoring all the old features that until now justified the price AND the increase of a VIP subscription.
I have just re-signed up to Trakt as VIP in an attempt to build a library that I can browse on Apple TV. I have a large physical media collection. When I login to the tvOS app I cannot see my library anywhere. How do I access it? I have added a few movies to try it, when I search for those titles they show as in my library, I just can’t seem to browse my library. Any ideas?
The Library on Trakt: What It Is and Where It’s Going.