Adding Movies & TV Content

In this article we'll cover every way to get movies and TV shows into RamTV's catalogue — by hand, from your own visitors, in bulk, and on autopilot — plus the setup steps and gotchas that actually matter once you start using them.

Before anything else: build your taxonomy

Every path below eventually needs People, Companies, Genres, Countries, Languages and Tags — and RamTV shares one copy of each between Movie and TV. None of them can be created on the fly while you're editing a movie or an episode: every picker in the admin panel, and in the upload wizard, is select-only. Whatever you want to attach has to exist first, on its own screen.

• People — actors, directors, writers, crew and musicians. One person record covers every credit they hold, across both movies and TV.
• Companies — studios, production and distribution companies.
• Genres, Countries, Languages, Tags — shared taxonomy attached to both movies and episodes.
• Collections — a named group for a franchise. Created empty on its own screen; movies are added to it from the movie's side, not the other way around — see Collections below.

If a picker comes up empty for someone or something you know exists — an actor who's on TheMovieDB, say — it's because their record hasn't been created in RamTV yet. Go create it on its own screen first, then come back and attach it.

Admin CRUD

The most direct route, and the most manual: build a title field by field in the admin panel. It's the right choice when you care about getting one title exactly right, not for filling a whole catalogue.

Adding a movie, start to finish

1. Create or confirm any people, companies, genres, countries, languages and tags this movie needs, on their own screens.
2. Create the Movie itself: cover art, background art, title, original title, storyline, tagline, release date and runtime, then attach the genres, tags, languages, countries and companies, plus the directors, writers, cast, crew, producers and music credits, from what you created in step 1.
3. Add at least one Source to the movie — either upload a video file, or paste a YouTube id. See Video sources below.
4. Add Subtitles if you have them. See Subtitles below.
5. Optionally put it in a Collection, if it belongs to one. See Collections below.

That's it — there's no separate "publish" step. The moment the Movie record is saved, it's live in the catalogue.

Adding a TV show, start to finish

TV is the same idea with one more layer: Show → Season → Episode, and each Episode carries its own Sources and Subtitles, the same way a Movie does.

1. Create the TV Show record — the same kind of fields as a movie: art, title, synopsis, genres, cast and so on.
2. Add a Season under it — a season number, plus its own art and overview.
3. Add Episodes under that Season — title, episode number, overview.
4. Add each episode's Sources and Subtitles the same way you would for a movie.

Seasons and Episodes each have their own list screen, scoped to the parent you're working on — you open a show to see its seasons, and a season to see its episodes.

Collections

A Collection is a single field on the Movie itself, not something you manage from the Collection's side. Create the Collection first — name and art, nothing to add to it yet — then open each movie that belongs in it and pick that Collection from the field on the movie's own edit screen.

Video sources

RamTV accepts a broad range of containers and codecs for a Source upload — whatever your server's ffmpeg install can read. If the file you upload isn't already a browser-compatible MP4, RamTV automatically probes it right after upload and transcodes it to one, so you don't need to pre-convert everything yourself before adding it. The list of file extensions your install actually accepts is admin-configurable, so if an upload is rejected outright, check the allowed file types in settings before assuming the format itself is unsupported.

Subtitles

Upload an SRT file and RamTV converts it to VTT for the player automatically, while keeping your original SRT around as a downloadable file for viewers who want it. That conversion happens the same way whether you add the subtitle yourself in the admin panel, or a visitor contributes it through the upload wizard.

You'll find all of this under Admin area → Movies (Movies, Collections, Sources, Subtitles) and Admin area → TV (TV Shows, Seasons, Episodes, Sources, Subtitles), with the shared People / Companies / Genres / Countries / Languages / Tags screens alongside them.

Uploader

RamTV also ships a self-service upload wizard, so a trusted role — not just an admin — can submit a movie or an episode from a form, without ever seeing the admin panel. It's desktop-only; the restriction is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the UI on a small screen. Uploading movies and uploading TV are separate permissions, so you can open one without the other.

What the wizard asks for

• Cover art, background art, title, storyline, original title, tagline, release date and runtime
• Genres, tags, languages, countries and companies — picked from what already exists, not created on the fly
• Directors, writers, cast, crew, producers and music credits — picked from existing people the same way
• A source: either an uploaded video file, or a YouTube id

Uploading a TV episode adds one step at the front: is this joining a series you already have, or starting a new one? Then a season number, then the usual title, episode number and overview per episode.

Fill from TheMovieDB

A separate permission adds a "Fill from TheMovieDB" button to the wizard. Type at least two characters of a title and RamTV searches TheMovieDB directly, showing up to 12 matches with a poster, year and a short synopsis. Picking one fills in the form — still fully editable before submitting. Whatever TheMovieDB id gets matched is stamped on the new item, so the regular TMDB automation job (see the automation guide) comes back afterward and keeps completing the record on its own — cast, artwork, ratings — without anyone doing it by hand.

Subtitle-only upload

A third, smaller permission lets someone attach a subtitle file to a title that already exists, without touching video at all. It goes through the same SRT-to-VTT conversion as an admin-added subtitle — useful for contributors who only translate, and never upload films.

Bulk Importer

For when the content already exists as a folder of video files sitting on your server, rather than something to upload one at a time. The Movie Bulk Importer turns that folder into catalogue entries in three passes, and lets you review everything before anything touches your live catalogue.

Movies

1. Drop your files: copy videos into the import folder — subfolders are fine, they're only for your own organisation — and press ReSync. A scan works out each file's title and year from its filename, probes it with ffmpeg to confirm it's actually a playable video, and stages one row per file. Anything without a usable video stream is flagged unusable rather than silently dropped.
2. Match it to TheMovieDB: press Sync with TheMovieDB to search and fill in the staged rows with real titles, artwork and metadata. Still just staging — nothing is live yet.
3. Review and import: check or correct the staged rows, mark the ones you want, and a background job turns each marked row into a real movie and its video source.

TV

The TV Bulk Importer works the same three-pass shape, adapted to a series. Point it at a folder laid out like:

Show Name/
  Season 01/
    S01E01 - Pilot.mkv
    S01E02 - Episode Two.mkv
  Season 02/
    S02E01 - ...mkv

and it reads the season and episode numbers out of each file's path and name instead of a single title and year. Matching against TheMovieDB fills in the show, season and episode metadata for every staged file at once, and importing builds the show/season/episode tree and attaches each file as that episode's source — a whole season in one pass, instead of one add-episode screen at a time.

Either importer carries a matched TheMovieDB id forward onto what it creates, so the automation described below keeps completing the record afterward — cast, ratings, artwork — exactly as it would for anything else. And because import runs as a background cronjob, nothing gets imported at all until your server's scheduler is actually running — see the automation guide.

Automation

Beyond adding things yourself, RamTV can keep the catalogue growing and improving in the background: pulling cast, artwork and ratings from TheMovieDB and other sources, fetching trailers, downloading subtitles, and — with an optional add-on — even sourcing new watchable files from torrent indexes. All of it runs as scheduled cronjobs you configure once, and there's enough to it that it gets its own article: setup, worked examples, credentials, monitoring and the legal caveats around the scraper-based bits.

Common gotchas

• A person, genre or company you know exists isn't in the picker — it hasn't been created in RamTV yet. Go create it on its own screen, then come back.
• A movie won't show up in a Collection — check the Collection field on the movie itself; Collections aren't edited from their own side.
• An uploaded video is rejected outright — check the allowed file types in settings before assuming the format itself is unsupported.
• Nothing from a bulk import or an automation job ever appears — your OS scheduler probably isn't calling RamTV's cron runner. See the automation guide.
• Something a visitor uploaded shouldn't be public — there's no review queue to catch it first. Only grant upload access to roles you trust, and check recent additions yourself.