Watch Folders and Plex
A watch folder turns a directory into a pipeline: drop a file in, and minutes later it is a published movie or episode — matched, categorised, encoded if needed, artwork and all. For a library that grows daily, this replaces the entire import routine.
Open Watch Folders → Add Folder.
Point it somewhere
Pick the server, the path, and the folder type — a local directory or an rclone mount, which is how a cloud drive becomes a content source. Limit which file extensions are picked up, and decide whether the panel serves files in place with symlink or copies them in.
What happens to a new file
Folders are scanned every few minutes. Each new file is matched against TMDB in the metadata language you choose, and lands as a movie or an episode with artwork, plot and cast. The decisions are all yours, per folder:
- No match? A fallback title pattern, an ignore-no-match switch, and fallback categories keep unrecognised files flowing into a holding area instead of vanishing.
- Duplicates — skip files whose TMDB match already exists in the catalogue.
- Auto-encode — run each arrival through a transcode profile into a target container.
- Subtitles — extract embedded subtitles automatically, or strip them before encoding.
- Auto-upgrade — when a better copy of an existing title arrives, it replaces the old one.
- Placement — categories for movies and for series, and the bouquets new content joins.
The encoding queue
Encodes from watch folders and manual imports share one visible queue, with concurrency limits you set — how many movies and how many channel encodes run at once — so a big drop of files saturates neither CPU nor disk. Watch-folder activity has its own log when a file does not appear where expected.
Plex
A Plex library can be synced as a source: the panel imports its titles on the same automatic cadence, so an existing Plex collection becomes subscriber-facing VOD without re-organising anything.
Automatic content in; next, automatic history back — the TV archive.