[BUG] Default windows 11 installation steps incomplete

[seth-rah]

Describe the bug

Windows 11 does not ship with WMIC as an installed feature anymore, and is planned to be deprecated. Currently requires manual installation.

Error messaging on trying to run trakt-scrobbler when WMIC is not present is not enough information for an end user to investigate why the installation is failing.

Attempting to

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS and Version: Win 11
• Python Version: 3.8+ (3.9, 3.10 and 3.13 were tried)
• Player and Version: N/A
• Trakt Scrobbler Version: 1.7.2

To Reproduce

• Fresh install latest revision of windows 11
• Follow instructions present here
• Attempting to start the service after populating details into step 6 will return error listed below.
• Does not populate information into the log file at AppData\Roaming\trakt-scrobbler when using --verbose

Logs

Click to see log contents

The nature of this error seems to be an annoying one, as it's a generalised return from python for not being able to reach a dependency. I found instances online of this being that ffprobe couldn't be reached, or some other topics like task scheduler due to pathing / permission issues. It's a nasty one.

FileNotFoundError

  [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified

  at AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\subprocess.py:1438 in _execute_child

      1434│             sys.audit("subprocess.Popen", executable, args, cwd, env)
      1435│
      1436│             # Start the process
      1437│             try:
    → 1438│                 hp, ht, pid, tid = _winapi.CreateProcess(executable, args,
      1439│                                          # no special security
      1440│                                          None, None,
      1441│                                          int(not close_fds),
      1442│                                          creationflags, 

Notes

Spent a bit too long trying to debug this, but found the data within the process monitor tool after looking options avaialble online to identify a potential cause of the error.

Windows Process Monitor View

After adding WMIC the issue was resolved.

Deprecation seems to not be far off with WMIC, so it likely needs the follow up task.

One recommendation is outside of adjusting the intallation guide, to create a fallback mechanism when a dependency isn't found, to print what is missing from the current system. It has to be available somewhere, otherwise I'd never have found it in the process monitor.

[iamkroot]

This is weird, we have already handled this 3 years ago-
2f1d9a4 (#193)
b2b4d44

If wmic is not available, it should simply fall back to the powershell gwmi command. (We still prefer wmic because it is much faster than spawning powershell to run gwmi.)

1. Is scrobbler actually crashing, or just reporting an error?
2. Could you post the full logs? Need to see where the error is raised from our code.

PS: Thanks for a detailed bug report and all your investigation!

[iamkroot]

Unfortunately I no longer have access to a Windows 11 machine, so I cannot really debug this myself.

[seth-rah]

It was unable to start up from my end.

Right now I can't really replicate it anymore because I managed to install it and get it working 😅

In terms of full logs, The log file wasn't generating at the time, even when verbose was used to initiate the start command. Other commands (like init) were generating logs, but starting the service would immediately crash before it was able to populate a log file.

[iamkroot]

Hmm interesting. What happens if you disable the WMIC optional feature?

[seth-rah]

Let's have a look quick.

Seeing as I forgot to add this.

Current steps.

1. trakts stop
2. Empty out existing trakt_scrobbler.log
3. trakts start --verbose
4. Validate that the logs populated where expected.

2025-06-15 18:19:37,463 - DEBUG - MainThread - notifier - Notifications enabled for categories: exception, misc, scrobble.pause, scrobble.resume, scrobble.start, scrobble.stop, trakt
2025-06-15 18:19:37,464 - INFO - notify_loop - notifier - Starting notif loop
2025-06-15 18:19:37,464 - DEBUG - MainThread - notifier - Notif actions enabled for categories: exception, misc, scrobble.pause, scrobble.resume, scrobble.start, scrobble.stop, trakt
2025-06-15 18:19:37,669 - INFO - MainThread - scrobbler - Started scrobbler thread.
2025-06-15 18:19:37,715 - DEBUG - MainThread - monitor - Autoloaded mpc-hc port = 13579
2025-06-15 18:19:37,715 - INFO - MainThread - monitor - Started monitor for mpc-hc
2025-06-15 18:19:41,825 - INFO - mpc-hc - monitor - Unable to connect to mpc-hc. Ensure that the web interface is running.

5. trakts stop
6. Empty out log file again
7. Close terminal
8. Remove wmic (Sloooooow)
9. Open terminal
10. trakts start --verbose
11. Error returned in console

trakts start --verbose

  FileNotFoundError

  [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified

  at AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\Lib\subprocess.py:1554 in _execute_child
      1550│             sys.audit("subprocess.Popen", executable, args, cwd, env)
      1551│
      1552│             # Start the process
      1553│             try:
    → 1554│                 hp, ht, pid, tid = _winapi.CreateProcess(executable, args,
      1555│                                          # no special security
      1556│                                          None, None,
      1557│                                          int(not close_fds),
      1558│                                          creationflags,

12. Check trakt_scrobbler.log
13. Empty, and trakts is not running.
14. Close Terminal
15. Reinstall WMIC
16. Open terminal again
17. trakts start --verbose
18. Starts up again with the logs populating

2025-06-15 18:31:29,631 - DEBUG - MainThread - notifier - Notifications enabled for categories: exception, misc, scrobble.pause, scrobble.resume, scrobble.start, scrobble.stop, trakt
2025-06-15 18:31:29,632 - INFO - notify_loop - notifier - Starting notif loop
2025-06-15 18:31:29,632 - DEBUG - MainThread - notifier - Notif actions enabled for categories: exception, misc, scrobble.pause, scrobble.resume, scrobble.start, scrobble.stop, trakt
2025-06-15 18:31:29,749 - INFO - MainThread - scrobbler - Started scrobbler thread.
2025-06-15 18:31:29,757 - DEBUG - MainThread - monitor - Autoloaded mpc-hc port = 13579
2025-06-15 18:31:29,757 - INFO - MainThread - monitor - Started monitor for mpc-hc
2025-06-15 18:31:33,839 - INFO - mpc-hc - monitor - Unable to connect to mpc-hc. Ensure that the web interface is running.

[iamkroot]

1. Step 11 is unfortunately very sparse on the error information. I don't see exactly where in our code this is originating from. Can you try running trakts start -vvv (with wmic disabled)?
2. With wmic disabled, does running gwmi command work in a powershell console? Output doesn't matter, just need to check if it exists on your machine. Better yet, we can run the exact command that we use- gwmi -Query "select processid from win32_process where name='trakts.exe' and commandline like '%run%'"