I last wrote about Trakt Scrobbler halfway through 2019, and it has undergone significant changes since then. This post is an updated version of the previous version, with new information and a new guide on installation.

If you use Trakt, you’ll likely know about scrobbling – where your media player checks you into what you are watching automatically, so it gets marked as finished automatically. Not only does this let you automatically show in the ‘now watching’ section of the show and show your progress on your profile, but it lets you keep Trakt up to date without having to go on the site.

Don’t know what Trakt is? Check out my in-depth review on it.

I use VLC to watch my videos – the official plugin doesn’t work, so I went around looking around for an alternative. I found Trakt Scrobbler – a small Github repository with less than 20 stars. However, I was blown away by how great it is – allowing me to easily scrobble from VLC. It also supports various other players, such as MPV, MPC, and MPC-HE.

What does it do?

Trakt Scrobbler allows you to connect VLC to Trakt, meaning that your shows are scrobbled and marked as watched in real time. This makes it easy to update your watched list without having to mark shows as read on the site itself.

It supports the following players:

VLC

MPV

Media Player Classic – BE

Media Player Classic – HC

However, in this post we will only be looking at the VLC integration.

Installation

Installation has been greatly simplified throughout the past year. It can be done with no command line knowledge at all, and is much easier to update, verify and do other commands.

You’ll need a few things to get Trakt Scrobbler up and running:

Python 3.7+

Pip

Pipx

Python installation is fairly simple – you can visit the Python website, and download the latest versions .exe . Once you have ran that, be sure you select add to path in the installer. Pip comes installed with Python.

Use pip to install pipx. Run the command python3 -m pip install --user pipx , which will install pipx. Then, verify the path by running python3 -m pipx ensurepath . I had to restart my computer after this step to get pipx working.

Now we need to use pipx to install Trakt scrobbler (known as trakts). To do this, run python -m pipx install trakt-scrobbler . Trakts will now install. What’s great about the recent updates to Trakt scrobbler is that it is now essentially a small program within Python – you can bring up commands by typing trakts , such as trakts stop and trakts config . Right now, you want to run trakts init . This will let you link Trakt scrobbler to your Trakt account.

For Mac, run brew install pipx , and then pipx ensurepath . Then run trakts init like above.

That’s it – now when you launch VLC videos, Trakt scrobbler will automatically scrobble them on your account, and when done, mark them as watched. If you find that it isn’t scrobbling your shows, make sure that your folder hierarchy and show names are well named, and that you have no brackets in the show titles. I use Tiny Media Manager to manage show names.

Trakt Scrobbler is a free and painless way to scrobble from VLC and Trakt.