Plex scrobble recipe: Plex to Trakt to deariary
Plex remembers everything you watch on it. The four-season rewatch you did over the holidays, the documentary you only got halfway through, the late-night film you put on after the kids went to bed. All of it sits in your Plex server’s watch history, scoped to your account, available whenever you log into the web app.
There is no native Plex integration in deariary today. It is on the wishlist, often requested, not yet built. But Plex history does not have to wait for that work. Trakt, which deariary already supports, behaves as a shared backend: almost every player in the self-hosting world can scrobble to it, including Plex via a small open-source bridge.
If you set up the Plex side once, every play your home server logs forwards to Trakt, and from Trakt into your deariary entry the next morning. No waiting. The path exists today.
This post is the recipe.
What “scrobbling” means here
Scrobbling is a word borrowed from Last.fm. It just means: when you finish playing something, the player tells a service “this account watched this title at this time.” Trakt accepts scrobbles from a long list of players, the same way Last.fm accepts scrobbles from a long list of music apps.
Plex does not scrobble to Trakt natively. There is no “connect Trakt” button inside Plex. What exists is a small ecosystem of third-party tools that read your Plex watch history and forward plays to Trakt on your behalf. The most actively maintained option is PlexTraktSync, an open-source Python tool that runs anywhere your server can reach Plex and Trakt. There are others, including Plex Pass webhook setups routed through Tautulli. The recipe below uses PlexTraktSync because it is free, does not require Plex Pass, and works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
You only need to set this up once. After that, it runs in the background and your Plex plays show up on Trakt automatically.
The recipe
Two pieces of work, both one-time. Once they are in place, every Plex play propagates to your diary on its own.
Pick the Plex profile your diary should follow
Plex tracks watch history per account. If a partner, kids, or a managed user share the server, the bridge below will read whatever profile you point it at. Decide which Plex user matches the diary you want to fill, and use that account’s credentials in the next step. If a shared profile has been collecting kids’ shows or someone else’s binges that would clutter your entries, user management is the place to split them apart first.
Install PlexTraktSync (or any equivalent bridge)
Install PlexTraktSync on a machine you can leave running. The Plex server itself works, or a small home box, or any always-on Linux machine. The project’s README walks through installation. The setup boils down to:
- Install with
pipx install PlexTraktSync, or run it via Docker. - Authorize both Plex and Trakt during the first-time setup prompt.
- Schedule it on an interval: cron, a systemd timer, or the Docker compose loop the project ships.
After the first sync, your past Plex history appears on Trakt’s watched section. Every new play afterwards propagates within the sync interval.
If you already run Tautulli on Plex Pass, an alternative is to point Tautulli’s webhook at a Trakt-scrobbling endpoint. Either path ends in the same place: your Plex plays are now Trakt entries.
The deariary half of this is described in the Trakt deep-dive and takes one OAuth approval. Use the same Trakt account the bridge writes to. From the next morning, your previous day’s Plex plays appear in your diary entry alongside anything else hitting that account.
What your diary looks like
Say a Sunday looks like this on your Plex server:
13:10 Plex: The Holdovers (2023, 133 min)
21:00 Plex: Slow Horses S03E01
21:50 Plex: Slow Horses S03E02
22:35 Plex: Slow Horses S03E03PlexTraktSync forwards each completed play to Trakt. The next morning, deariary reads it from Trakt and the resulting entry reads something like:
The afternoon film was The Holdovers. After dinner you ran through three episodes of Slow Horses, the third season opening, from nine until just past eleven.
Notice what happened to the three Slow Horses entries. They collapsed into one binge, with the show carrying the line, instead of three separate scrobbles. The Trakt fetcher groups episodes by series and merges any rating you give the title, so a show you binged and rated 9 reads as a single watching event in the diary.
What you give up versus a native integration
Going through Trakt is not free. A native Plex integration would let deariary pull a few things scrobbling does not.
Plex-only metadata is lost. If you watched a personal video, a home movie, or any title that is not on Trakt’s database, the scrobbler cannot match it and the play is dropped. Trakt is keyed to public film and TV; private library content stays on Plex.
Per-device context is lost. Trakt knows the title and the timestamp. It does not know whether you watched on the living room TV, on a phone in bed, or on a laptop while traveling. Plex’s session metadata covers this; a native integration could read it. The scrobble path drops it.
The first scrobble is end-of-play, not start-of-play. Most scrobblers report a play after a percentage threshold (often around 80%). A film you started and abandoned twenty minutes in does not show up. For most diary purposes this is the right behavior, since an abandoned title is not a meaningful watch event. But if you want every started play recorded, a native integration would handle it differently.
Setup is a one-time tax. Connecting a native integration is one OAuth click. Setting up PlexTraktSync is a Python install plus a sync schedule plus a one-time Trakt authorization. After that it runs untouched, but the first hour of work is real.
For most home-media users, none of these matter enough to wait. The watches you remember are the public titles on Trakt’s database, and those flow through fine.
What this gives you that nothing else does
The reason this recipe exists at all is that Plex watch history is otherwise stuck on the server. The Plex web app shows it as a list. There is no “what did I watch this Tuesday” view that reads like a Tuesday. Trakt, on its own, is closer: it has the history, but you have to scroll the activity tab to see it as a sequence.
Plugging Plex history into your diary changes the unit. Instead of a list of titles, you get a paragraph: the afternoon film, the late-evening binge, the show you finished, the documentary you abandoned. Six months later, that paragraph is the way the day is filed. The Plex history is still there if you want to drill into it, but the readable version, the one that makes the day come back, lives in the diary entry.
If you also have music scrobbling (Plex Music plays through Last.fm, or any other source on Last.fm) and a calendar or social integration connected, the watches sit alongside everything else and the day reads as a day, not as three separate logs. The media consumer diary stack covers what that combination looks like in practice.
Plans and limits
Trakt sits on every deariary plan. Free fits one integration slot, which is enough for a Plex-only experiment. To layer Plex history on top of a calendar, music, or gaming source, the Basic plan and above raise the cap to five integrations. The current breakdown is on the deariary homepage.
When the native integration ships
A native Plex integration is on the wishlist. When it ships, you will have two paths: the Trakt-scrobble path described above, which keeps working, and a direct connection that picks up Plex-only metadata. Until then, scrobbling to Trakt is how your Plex watch history reaches your diary, with no waiting and no compromise on the public-title content that makes up most of what you watch.
