Trakt

As part of my planned development of an integrated home network media system I have subscribed to Trakt (free) and downloaded the Trakt plug-in for Kodi which is my media client (player)

What is Trakt

Trakt is a platform that does many things, but primarily keeps track of TV shows and movies you watch. It integrates with your media centre or home theatre PC to enable scrobbling, so everything is automatic.

Definition of scrobbling – to track every TV show and movie you watch, automatically from your media centre.

You can use Trakt on pc’ tablet or smartphone to check what’s available.  You are even able to rate things you have watched, or follow other people with similar tastes, or provide an opinion.  Personally I would never do the latter three as it could be used for data harvesting.

My planned future home media system will look something like this.

• Raspberry Pi to access the UseNet and download content.  It will run 24/7 and being a very low power device should cost approx $5pa to run.  The software will be:
  • Raspberrian OS
  • NZBGet
  • Sonaar
  • CouchPotato
• Combined Media Server, TV capture box and Network Access Server (NAS).  This will be the powerful ‘backend’ of the system and automatically enter hibernation when not in use thus reducing electrical consumption.  The software will be:
  • Ubuntu Server (NAS)
  • Mythtv  (free to air TV capture – 4 channels simultaneously)
  • Emby (media transcoder)
  • Trakt (database of media library and recommended available programs)
  • Filebot.  Media organiser and renaming program
• Kodi.  Media player on TV, Tablet, Smartphone.

All the above software is free. 

I have already built a MythTV box in Australia.  It incorporates a linked electronic program guide which is smart enough to remember and record programs we like.  It also automatically identifies and strips out commercial breaks before compressing the recorded data to MP4 format.

We already have the Raspberry Pi and the TV tuner cards.  I will be attempting to reuse as many old computer components as possible.  Hopefully costs will be confined to the purchase of a motherboard and processor for the planned server.  It should have sufficient processing power to simultaneously transcode media to eight separate users over the home network and internet.