Seanime

What it is

Seanime is a self-hosted anime player with deep AniList integration. It reads from the same media mount Plex does, but presents a UI optimized for anime — series tracking by season, episode-aware progress sync, integrated AniList search.

Why I run it

Plex is a great general-purpose media server but it's not built around anime conventions — season/episode numbering, sub vs dub, the difference between cours, AniList vs MAL identifiers. Seanime is. For anime specifically, the viewing experience is just better, and the AniList sync is first-class instead of bolted on.

The pair "Plex for everything, Seanime for anime" is what I've settled on. Same files, two viewing clients, each one playing to its strengths.

How I use it

The shape is identical to Plex: it reads from the host-managed media mount provided by rclone. Login is an AniList OAuth flow — when I watch an episode through Seanime, my AniList progress updates automatically. For anime watched through Plex (TV apps, the iPhone Plex client, etc.), I use AniBridge instead — different mechanism, same outcome.

The two AniList integrations are independent. Seanime authenticates me against AniList for client-side tracking when I'm watching through Seanime. AniBridge holds a server-side token that updates AniList based on Plex playback events. They can run side by side without conflicting.

Setup notes

• Host: the media LXC.
• Mount: same host-managed media bind that Plex and Riven use.
• Reverse proxy: yes.
• Backups: PBS captures the LXC; Seanime's state is in a SQLite DB in the config directory.
• Update cadence: manual.

Runbook

• Healthy looks like: dashboard loads, the library populates from the mount, AniList watch lists show up after login.
• Empty library / "no media found": the media mount inside the container is empty. Same stale-FUSE-FD pattern as the other media consumers — the helper script that restarts rclone plus all consumers fixes it.
• AniList watch progress isn't updating: depends on which client played the episode. If it was Seanime, the Seanime session is broken (re-authenticate). If it was Plex, that's AniBridge's job, not Seanime's.
• Playback slow or buffering: two layers to check. First, is the upstream mount slow (time cat a small file through it — should return in under 200 ms). Second, is the LXC CPU-saturated (Seanime does some transcoding depending on the client).
• Where logs live: docker logs seanime on the host.