plugin.video.artemediathek is broken in official repo, but seems used a lot

[thomas-ernest]

Add-on details:

• Add-on name: Arte Mediathek
• Add-on ID: plugin.video.artemediathek
• Version number: 2.0.1
• Kodi/repository version: Matrix

Ownership

• I am the owner of this add-on
  No I am not the owner of Arte Mediathek, but the one of Arte +7.

Broken because:

Various exceptions in kodi.log. No update for 6y. Last publication in official repository is on the 2nd of July 2020:
bf759e4

Download Statistics Discrepancy

The download count shown on the addon page:

https://kodi.tv/addons/omega/plugin.video.artemediathek → ~2.223M downloads

differs significantly from the mirrors statistics:

https://mirrors.kodi.tv/stats?downloadstats&filter=plugin.video.artemediathek → ~311k downloads

I would like to understand the source of download statistics used on kodi.tv/addons.
Q1: Are these two numbers measuring different types of events (e.g., repository pulls vs. direct downloads)?

The official version:

Version 2.0.1, provider-name "sarbes"
https://github.com/xbmc/repo-plugins/blob/matrix/plugin.video.artemediathek/addon.xml#L2

appears to be non-functional.

Meanwhile, an unofficial version:

Version 1.0.13, provider-name "68000a"
https://github.com/68000a/Gigathek/blob/master/code/plugin.video.artemediathek/addon.xml#L2

is actively maintained and works correctly.

Daily icon access for the addon is around 14k hits (example: https://mirrors.kodi.tv/stats?downloadstats=2026-08-03).
Q2: Does this metric indicate usage of the addon (through the download of its icon) ?

Q3: How should the community proceed when the functional version exists only outside the official repository ?

Thank you,
Best regards,