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Import Your First Movie

This tutorial picks up where Get Mydia Running left off. You have Mydia running with an admin account and an empty movies library. By the end of this one, that library holds one movie, matched and complete with a poster and metadata, without touching a download client, an indexer, or any external service. It takes about 5 minutes.

You need a running Mydia instance with the movies library from that tutorial. If you haven't done that yet, start there first.

Step 1: Create a Placeholder File

Mydia doesn't need a real video to import something, just a file with the right name in the right place. On the host machine, inside the media directory you mapped in your compose file, create an empty file:

touch "/path/to/your/media/library/movies/Big Buck Bunny (2008).mkv"

Use that name exactly. Mydia reads the title and year straight out of the filename (Title (Year).extension) to search for a metadata match, so Big Buck Bunny (2008).mkv gives it exactly what it needs. A file named bbb.mkv would scan in just as easily but leave Mydia with nothing to search for. The name is the lesson: get it right and matching is automatic.

Step 2: Trigger a Library Scan

Open Mydia in your browser and click Import Files on the dashboard, the same page you landed on after creating your admin account. Your Movies library tab is already selected.

Click Start scan. Mydia scans the folder and searches for a metadata match for anything it finds, with Automatically import confident matches in this run checked by default.

Step 3: Watch It Get Matched and Imported

Because the filename parsed cleanly, the match is confident, and automatic import is on, Mydia imports it on its own once the scan finishes -- there is nothing left to review for this file.

Step 4: See the Result

Open Movies in the sidebar. Big Buck Bunny is there with its poster. Click it to see the full metadata page, including the synopsis, all pulled from a filename and a scan.

What You Just Did

You brought a file into a library with nothing but a correctly named placeholder and a scan; Mydia handled the search, the match, and the metadata itself. That is the same mechanism behind importing a real collection, just with one file instead of thousands.