<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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For testing, I find it most useful to just provide some 'dummy data' for Thea to chew on. Simply providing some plain text files named as if they were movies inside of the import path will be enough to trick Thea in to ingesting them... Of course, you won't get very far, and Thea will throw a trouble at you fairly soon.
Some example names for your empty files:
WandaVision.S01E03.iNTERNAL.HDR.2160p.WEB.h265-KOGi.mkv (This item will raise a trouble at the OMDB step as it finds multiple matches)Rick.and.morty.S05E01.2019.Mort.Dinner.Rick.Andre.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-NTb.mkv (This item will be correctly detected as an episode, and will be found in OMDB)Sample.S01E01.1080p.mkv (This item will... surprisingly have a match in OMDB!)To get a feel for the UI, the above is all you really need to do... However, if you want to test the actual transcoding then you need to create a transcode profile and provide a video file for Thea to transcode:
To create a profile, open the web UI and go to the Settings page. From there, create a profile and name it whatever you like. You can leave the rest of the settings as they are, the default will work just fine.
Next, I suggest grabbing a demo .mkv file from the internet and plopping that in there. Provide it with a name such as "1917.2019.iNTERNAL.RERiP.HDR10Plus.2160p.UHD.BluRay.x265.JustWatch.mkv" (a.k.a a typical name from a torrent site) and watch Thea move your item through its pipeline.