<aside> 👋 This page is part of the Getting Started collection. If you’re new to Thea then familiarizing yourself with the pages in this collection is a good idea.
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Ingestion of media - the act of downloading, importing, and hydrating - is a fundamental part of the Thea user experience. This document aims to describe it in detail, providing links to more technical descriptions where applicable.
Upon detection of an item in the ingestion directory, Thea creates an ‣ and moves it through a pipeline consisting of multiple stages:
As any one of these stages can run into problems - often requiring user intervention to resolve the problem - Thea uses it’s Trouble System to track and manage problems.
Once an item has been successfully ingested, the media will appear in the user's media browser and will be discoverable via search. The user can watch their media using two main strategies, outlined in Watching Media.
Additionally, pre-transcode tasks may be started as a result of post-ingestion transcode workflows, documented in Media Transcoding.