Is there software that tracks movies and TV shows I’ve watched and lets me manually add them to my library?
I use Jellyfin, but it lacks this feature. I’m looking for a solution that allows me to create placeholders for shows or seasons I’ve watched elsewhere, without having to download or create empty MP4 files.
It would be even better if this software integrates with Jellyfin.
After Trakt changed to a subscription, I’ve went with NeoDB. This is a federated network, so you can also host it yourself if you like. All entries there can be published into the Fediverse, too. It tracks movies, shows, books, and games. And it automatically imports from IMDb, TheMovieDB, Amazon, Steam, and many more. There’s just one little quirk: since this app started out in China, many actors show up with their Chinese names - but can be easily edited to their English names.
There’s also eggplant.place which is the development build of NeoDB and might be unstable but has more English content.
https://neodb.social/@mbirth/posts/522457362146719720/
This seems great, but I don’t fully understand how it works with the Fediverse. Instead of everything being local, can I now share what I’ve watched with others and see their comments as well?
Yes, whenever you mark a movie or an episode as “to watch”, “watching” or “watched”, this gets published like a Mastodon post. You also have the option to automatically retoot this from your main Mastodon account. Others can follow you from Mastodon and react to your events. (For some reason, they don’t properly show up here, though.) And, of course, it all shows up for other users on NeoDB.
Another vote for NeoDB. It’s been very useful for me and more people on fedi need to know about it.
Why is damn near everything in Chinese?
To quote myself:
The author of the app is Chinese (but speaks English, too).
The actors get imported upon the very first import of a movie/show. And when a movie is imported from Douban first, the actors will all show up with their Chinese transliterations. If you import a new movie from TheMovieDB, they’ll show up with their English names. But as mentioned above, you can edit the names - which is what I usually do for US-movies. Descriptions support multi-language, though. Once an English description has been imported, it should show up for you while Chinese people will continue to see the Chinese description.
And the more English-language users start to use NeoDB, the more initially-English content will pop up.
It may be “easy” to edit the names, but unless it’s a one-time universal toggle, that’d be a dealbreaker to me.
You can always join one of the mainly English instances like Eggplant.place or ReviewDB or host your own. But as long as the majority of NeoDB.social users are Chinese, the dominant language there won’t change.
OTOH it’s easy to use the API - so, instead of doing it manually, I’m tempted to write a small tool that you can throw a link to a movie or show at and it’ll change all Chinese actor names to their English counterparts.
I think there may be an issue with language support here. It seems that once a movie is fetched and stored on the instance, the metadata stays permanent. It would be easier if every item were tracked using a universal identifier, such as IMDb.
Items are tracked using IDs. But if a movie was imported from Douban, NeoDB only knows the Douban ID. Same with IMDb. However, since TheMovieDB records often have IMDb IDs as well, it’ll import both identifiers if you import from there.
And there’s a feature to merge duplicate imports into one. This will make that resulting record available under all the different IDs.
!neodb@lemmy.zip