The Movie Database Support
Support → General
Lists and "watched" tracking
posted by thwallerSTAFFMOD on June 17, 2018 at 6:34 PM
I see there is an option to create lists and a watch list. Is there a method to use those lists in a way that Trakt does (trakt.tv)? Here is why I am asking if it may help answer...
I have been using Trakt to keep track of what I have in my collection and what I have watched. That is about all I use it for, I really have no need or interest in any other things. The problem I have is data integrity there, and a lacking of a way to control the data I enter. The most common issue is duplicate movie entities, where you can report a data duplication, but data ends up lost during the "fix". Without getting into the details, I have seen it first hand lose track of a watched status when the watched mark was placed on a duplicate before it was removed as an example of issues.
I know that Trakt is nothing but a duplication of the data here, which is where the problem is. You can import the data, but when data is changed here, it is not always applied there. It makes me question the need for such a thing vs just going direct, meaning here. I believe all I would need is the availability and code to to sync list data as it is done there, and I could just use TMDB for all and reduce problems. Plus, as you are an open system, access to my data is not an issue here.
Is this something that is already possible, and if not, is this something that could be done?
Reply by Travis Bell
on June 19, 2018 at 12:19 PM
Hi @thwaller,
I love hearing from users like you about this. There aren't any immediate plans to introduce any tracking features right now but I've been hearing more and more from users like you who are asking for it, so it's becoming more likely. There's a couple big features that are being discussed right now so I'll make sure we give this some thought.
Thanks!
Reply by thwaller
on June 19, 2018 at 1:29 PM
Thanks for the reply. If I can help in any way, let me know. At very least, I can help with testing.
Reply by wyldstar
on December 5, 2018 at 5:26 PM
I would love to see this as well :-)
Reply by purplecandy
on April 25, 2019 at 2:24 AM
@travisbell Simple integration like adding episodes to custom list will also do the job.
Reply by thwaller
on September 6, 2019 at 9:45 PM
This has been sitting a while so I Wanted to keep it current and add more detail....
One struggle I have is there are many places to track things. Here at TMDB I can import from IMDB things like ratings, but I do not use IMDB. Currently I use Trakt, which does have an API. I chose Trakt for bad reasons, but I continue to use it for good reasons.
The bad..... Straight away, they are a freemium service. The free portion is adequate for most things assuming you can deal with the ads. Where it lacks is the access to data. Importing and exporting are limited to free accounts, but I believe with the API, you can get around it somewhat. Additionally, they maintain a limited database. You only populate movies and shows from TMDB and TVDB only, all data needs to be entered there to import to Trakt. Many of you here understand databases, so it is clear that Trakt is providing basically a secondary set of tables for user data only, second to the tables of data maintained at TMDB and TVDB that are import changeable only. What this means to me as a user is that Trakt provides me the following per movie and/or show/episode entity.
While this is quite useful, it is honestly something I could maintain locally on something like a MySQL database and write myself a few web pages to use the APIs of others and change as I please. But there is an advantage to having this done on a larger scale. Trakt does nice at keeping that database and its ties to other databases for movie/show/episode data is working reasonably well. I my experience, the #1 issue there is poor imported data, meaning wrong, incomplete, etc. I help out what I feel is a lot there, mostly requesting updates and fixes to that imported data. That is easily 95% of my support tickets and I have concern over my user data as the entities that get removed/merged/etc happen.
I currently maintain my own local SQLite database of my data. I have a series of scripts and SQL to pull the data from Trakt, pull data for movie/show sources, pull data from tMM (my local media management software) and compare them to identify errors that need fixing, meaning manual edits needed in Trakt to make it correct. This took some effort and testing on my end to get it working properly, but I can say it works without error at this time and even has error checking and validating scripts.
The reason I present this here is in order to get my data into Trakt, I need to start here. So my thought is why do I start here and then leave for a small set of user data tables? It is completely frustrating that there are multiple items needed to make this all happen. This is where I can vision an all-in-one service that ties it all together. I understand the focus at TMDB is movie and show data. But I believe that is daily user interactions were done here (with advantage to users to switch to here), user contribution would increase.