What do we hydrate?

The hydration stage is centered around using external third-party services to gather as much information as possible about the media you’re ingesting. This includes, but is not limited to:

• The title of your media*****
• Runtime*****
• Plot description
• Cast & crew members (e.g., lead cast, director, producer, writer)
• Images (such as poster and banner art)
• Content rating (e.g., PG, M, R13)
• User ratings (e.g., Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB)
• Genre information
• Release year*****
• …

<aside> 🤔 *A lot of the time some of this information (marked with ) can be gathered without third-party services, however external services offer a much higher degree of accuracy, and are required for other information, such as plot, genres and poster art.

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How do we search TMDB?

The above information is found mainly thanks to searching for it using TMDB Searching.

By using the information we gathered during the Download & Import stage, we can perform a precise search on TMDB for a matching media entry. Thea narrows down the search results by filtering only for:

• Media with a matching name (if a match cannot be found, we reduce the specificity of the name multiple times before giving up)