Media library

How libraries work

A library is a folder plus a type. The type — not the folder's name — is what tells De Rien how to read the folder's contents:

• movies — a collection of films
• series — TV shows with seasons and episodes
• documentary — cataloged like movies, under their own category

You pick the type when you add a library, in the setup wizard or later from the admin settings. Name the folders whatever you like; a folder called Films or Cinema works exactly the same as long as you give it the movies type.

A suggested layout

Here's a tidy starting point. Everything under your mounted media directory:

/media/
├── Movies/                → library type: movies
│   └── Blade Runner 2049 (2017)/
│       └── Blade Runner 2049 (2017).mkv
├── Series/                → library type: series
│   └── Severance (2022)/
│       └── Season 01/
│           └── Severance - S01E01.mkv
└── Documentaries/         → library type: documentary
    └── Free Solo (2018)/
        └── Free Solo (2018).mp4

Per-title subfolders are recommended, but loose files dropped directly in a library root also work — De Rien will group and parse them.

Naming conventions

The scanner is forgiving (it understands scene/release names too), but the cleaner your names, the better the matches.

Movies & documentaries

• Title (Year) or Title [Year] — e.g. Dune (2021).
• Year-titled films like 1917 are understood too.

Series

• Season folders: Season 01, Season 1, Saison 2, S01, or Specials (specials are treated as season 0).
• Episodes: S01E02, 1x03, worded Season 2 Episode 3 / Saison 2 Épisode 3, or a bare E05 / 03.mkv when it sits inside a season folder.

Supported video files

.mkv  .mp4  .avi  .ts  .m2ts  .flv  .webm  .mov  .m4v

Subtitles

De Rien serves subtitles that are embedded inside the video container and extracts them on demand. External sidecar files — a loose Movie.en.srt next to the video — are not indexed. If you want subtitles to show up, mux them into the .mkv/.mp4.

Artwork & metadata

Posters, backdrops, summaries and cast come from TMDB, matched using the title and year parsed from your files. A free TMDB_API_KEY is required (see Configuration → TMDB).

Without a key, De Rien won't scan your library at all — a catalog with no titles or artwork wouldn't be usable, so it refuses to run and points you at the key instead.

Scanning your library

• A scan runs automatically at the end of the setup wizard — provided a TMDB key is configured (without one, there's nothing to build a catalog from).
• You can re-scan any time from the admin settings, with live progress as it works through your files.
• When a download completes through the built-in qBittorrent integration, the affected library is re-scanned automatically.