[App Suggestion]: Scrob

[qbxwatcher]

Category

Application

Feature title

Scrob

What problem does this solve?

Your media. Tracked your way.

How would you like it to work?

Sync with Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby. Track watch history, ratings, and lists. Your own private Letterboxd + Trakt.

Who benefits most?

Most users

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Submitted by @wormy via qb.web. Source: qb-web-form.

[mophawka]

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Scrob

[mophawka]

As I sit here and think to myself, “why the fuck would anyone want this vibe-coded shit?”, I did actually take the time to look it up. Even though, personally, I still prefer the Urban Dictionary meaning of “scrob.”

Scrob makes some sense once I stopped comparing it directly to QuickBox WSD, because they’re really trying to solve two different problems.

Scrob is basically a self-hosted Trakt/Letterboxd. Its focus is the viewer and their long-term media profile: watch history, ratings, reviews, lists, rewatches, discovery, and keeping that history independent of whatever Plex/Jellyfin/Emby server you happen to be using. If you switch servers later, your viewing history doesn’t have to disappear with it. That’s probably the strongest argument for Scrob.

WSD, on the other hand, is much more of an operations/admin dashboard, and IMO that’s where WSD really shines.

If you run Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby for yourself, family, friends, or multiple users, WSD gives you a much better picture of what is happening on those servers in real time. You can see active streams, who is watching, which client/device they’re using, stream quality, bandwidth consumption, whether something is Direct Playing or transcoding, and what the transcode is actually doing.

It also gives you tools to act on that information rather than just display it. You can control playback sessions, manage users and devices, apply stream/pause rules, monitor usage, inspect viewing analytics, deal with transcode-related cleanup, and generally manage the media-server side of the equation from one place. The ability to bring multiple Plex/Jellyfin/Emby instances into one operational dashboard is especially useful if you run more than a single simple server.

That makes the distinction pretty straightforward:

• Scrob answers: “What have I watched, what did I think of it, and what should I watch next?”
• WSD answers: “What is happening across my media servers right now, who is using them, and do I need to do anything about it?”

So if what you want is a self-hosted Trakt and a durable personal watch-history/profile layer, Scrob is probably a decent fit. I don’t use Trakt or really care for it myself, but since the feature request had basically zero context, it piqued my curiosity if nothing else.

If what you care about is actually operating the media servers , concurrent users, streams, bandwidth, transcodes, clients, playback problems, usage policies, and administration. WSD is considerably stronger there because that is essentially its core purpose.

[JMSDOnline]

I really appreciate the thoughtful breakdown on this one @mophawka - I was a bit confused at the overall lack of depth on the request and this sums things up quite nicely.