Lists

A list in kino is a mirror of an external URL that resolves to a set of titles — a curator’s “Best of A24”, a friend’s Trakt list, your own MDBList. Kino polls it on a schedule, surfaces it as a browsable page under /lists, and lets you click any poster to add that one title to your library.

Lists never auto-acquire. A 1,000-item list becomes a 1,000-item browse page; nothing downloads until you explicitly add an item.

Supported sources

Source	Example URL	Auth required
MDBList	`https://mdblist.com/lists/{user}/{slug}`	MDBList API key (one per install)
TMDB	`https://www.themoviedb.org/list/{id}`	None (uses kino’s TMDB token)
Trakt custom list	`https://trakt.tv/users/{user}/lists/{slug}`	Trakt connection (any direction)
Trakt watchlist	`https://trakt.tv/users/{user}/watchlist`	Trakt connection (your own watchlist only)

Add a list

Open /lists from the sidebar.
Click Add list, paste the URL, and click Preview.
Kino fetches the list’s title, description, and item count, then shows a preview. Click Add to start following.

The list appears on /lists immediately. The first poll runs in the background; once it completes, the list-detail page populates with posters.

MDBList API key

MDBList is the only source that requires a user-provided key — TMDB lists piggyback on kino’s TMDB token, and Trakt lists use your existing Trakt connection.

Sign up at mdblist.com and grab an API key from your account settings.
In kino, Settings → Integrations → MDBList, paste the key, and Save.

Without a key, the add-list flow rejects MDBList URLs with a link back to Settings.

Following the Trakt watchlist

If you’ve connected Trakt, your watchlist appears automatically as a system list — pinned to the top of /lists, visually distinct, and locked (you can’t unfollow it without disconnecting Trakt).

Polling is folded into the same 5-minute Trakt sync that handles everything else. Items added on Trakt show up in kino within minutes.

Polling cadence

Source	Interval
MDBList	every 6 hours
TMDB	every 6 hours
Trakt custom list	every hour
Trakt watchlist	every 5 minutes (via Trakt sync)

Each list page has a Refresh button that forces an immediate poll — useful when you’ve just added an item to a list elsewhere and want to see it here.

Browsing a list

Click any list card on /lists for its detail page. Each item is a standard poster card with the same hover affordances as the rest of kino — Play, Add, Remove. A small badge shows the item’s state in your library:

not in library — never added
in library — added, may be monitoring or already acquired
monitoring — kino is searching for releases
acquired — file present
watched — already watched

Click an item to open its full Movie or Show detail page.

Pinning to home

Each list card has a Pin toggle. Pinned lists render as horizontal rows on the Home page, mixed in with the built-in rows (“Continue watching”, “Recommended for you”, etc.).

The order on Home matches the pin order on /lists. To change it, use Customise Home from the home page.

Add-never-subtract

Removing an item from a source list never removes it from your kino library. If a curator prunes “A24 complete” and drops Eighth Grade, kino removes it from the list page (the mirror reflects the source) but leaves your file alone.

This is deliberate. Files don’t vanish because someone else edited a list.

Bulk-growth notification

When a single poll adds more than 20 items to a list (default, configurable via list_bulk_growth_threshold), kino fires a notification — “List ‘X’ added 47 items”. Lets you notice big curator changes without spam on every small delta.

This routes through the same notification pipeline as everything else — see Notifications.

Common issues

“Unsupported list URL” — kino accepts the four URL shapes in the table above. Trim query parameters and stick to the canonical path. Trakt watchlists are only accepted for the user that’s currently connected.

MDBList list won’t preview — check that you’ve saved an MDBList API key under Settings → Integrations and that the key is valid.

Trakt watchlist isn’t showing — the watchlist appears once Trakt is connected. If you connected and it’s still missing, hit Sync now on the Trakt settings page.

List shows “source unreachable” — the list URL returned an error on the last poll. Kino retries on the next scheduled poll; after three consecutive failures it fires a notification. If a list is permanently dead, unfollow it.