The first stage of your media journey in Thea is to of course, import it. This stage is actually composed of two mutually exclusive stages - both offering a different strategy to import your data.

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Import Strategies

As mentioned, Thea provides two pathways for users to import their media:

<aside> 📢 The two stages below are mutually exclusive - meaning an item only gets processed by one of them. However, both of these strategies are enabled by default and you can use whichever you prefer on a per-item basis.

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• Automated Ingestion: Download or otherwise provide the content using some other means (e.g., downloading using a third-party torrent client) and place the downloaded content in a particular directory. Thea can detect and automatically import the content once it’s finished downloading.
• Managed Download: Downloading the content using Thea’s built-in torrent client, automatically importing the media upon completion.

Which option you use is typically dependent on your existing home media setup. If you’re looking to automate your media download, then you may find the second option to be more flexible.

Regardless of which you chose, Thea will gather a lot of metadata about your media before moving to the next stage

Automated Ingestion

Managed Downloads

Metadata Scraping

As mentioned in the introduction, this stage must populate some important metadata on your item before handing it off to the Hydration stage.

• Title (either the name of the movie or the name of a specific episode)
• Whether the media is an episode of a series; If so:
  • Series name
  • Season number
  • Episode number