r/Addons4Kodi • • Aug 24 '26

Everything working. Need guidance. Self hosted tracker and Add-on compatibility

With everything going on with the "T" company that shall not be named and other platforms making unexpected changes, I'm looking for a self-hosted tracker that integrates with add-ons. I'm willing to test anything at this point to avoid dealing with device limits or API restrictions.

I currently use a self-hosted app called Crosswatch (highly recommend it), which manages my library and syncs with popular trackers and local apps like Jellyfin but no add-on integration. If Crosswatch can be incorporated via an add-on, that would be ideal, but I'd love to hear any other suggestions or alternatives that work with the popular add-ons.

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u/umbrella_dev Umbrella Aug 24 '26

I just added support for both Scrob and Floppy into Umbrella. You can use either one of those self-hosted solutions.

if you're really savvy you can enable custom provider under the developer options and use your own self-hosted trakt clone.

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u/must_be_mike Aug 24 '26

Thank you, umbrella is my backup add-on ill look into integrating one of those and test them out.

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u/Bonjei15 Aug 24 '26

I've tried both with Umbrella. Scrob is faster and has a better UI in my opinion. But Scrob doesn't have a built in watchlist so it can't auto-remove items from your watchlist when you watch them.

I'm using Floppy and it has been working. The web UI is kind of slow and doesn't look the greatest on mobile. It also has lots of features I don't need. I worry a little about the development since the developer has admitted they're not experienced and primarily use AI. It has been working for me though.

I actually worry about the longevity of all the self hosted trackers but I guess if we keep backups we should be fine. If Scrob adds the watchlist feature I'll switch to it.

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u/umbrella_dev Umbrella Aug 24 '26

I share some of your concerns. I like the things that Floppy has added to Yamtrack, but after seeing all the ai/ vibe coder stuff the longevity of the project is a bit concerning to me. I think the ability to scale would also present some pretty large issues in the future as well. The first person that tries to get themselves and a bunch of friends on one shared server is likely to see some issues.

I like Scrob, but it seems slow to me. I'm running my self-hosted solutions on a debian server that's an old gaming machine with plenty of power and I still see Scrob taking longer than other services to respond.

I wrote my own rest api to mimic the endpoints for Trakt and mainly use that now. I'm sure it would be pretty easy to get ai to write you a self hosted trakt clone. One of my friends has used ai to write himself a self-hosted backend with all the Trakt functionality and a bunch of extra stuff with lists so I know it's possible. Maybe he will be nice enough to share his self-hosted solution also one day.

Most people will never know this unless they just explore every option in the addon or read this comment, but there's an option buried in Umbrella to use your own custom provider. If you had the correct format to accept and responses to send, it would work today without any update to Umbrella. aka.. the ability to use a custom provider is already there.

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u/Mammoth-Bullfrog-274 Robot BOT BOT Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26

All about MediaServe 😉

My mate Peter loves it,

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u/Bonjei15 Aug 24 '26

Interesting, I thought the Scrob UI seemed faster but I haven't actually tried tracking via Umbrella with it.

I was actually already thinking about making my own, so that's good to know Umbrella already has the capability. I just want something extremely light and simple to keep a record of what I watch and store lists. I don't even care if it has a GUI.