Library and automation

Kino’s job is to keep a personal media library in sync with what you want to watch. You tell it which movies and shows you care about; it finds them, brings them in, organises them on disk, and refreshes the metadata over time. This page covers the user-facing side — what “following” means, what monitoring controls do, and how the library view is laid out.

Adding content

Anything you find through search, Discover, or a list can be added with one click.

• Movies — open the movie’s detail page and pick Get. Kino searches your indexers, grabs the best match against the active quality profile, downloads, and imports.
• Shows — open the show’s detail page and pick Follow. By default this monitors the show, queues every aired episode for acquisition, and auto-acquires new episodes as they air.
• Quick play — pressing Play on a movie or episode that isn’t in your library yet auto-follows it in the background and starts streaming as soon as the file is playable.

Search uses TMDB, so anything TMDB knows about is fair game. Episodes of a show appear automatically once the show is followed — you don’t add them one by one.

What “monitored” means

Every movie and show carries a monitored flag. When something is monitored, Kino:

• Looks for releases on the configured search interval
• Keeps trying until it finds a release that meets the active quality profile
• Upgrades to a better release later if one appears and the profile permits it

Unmonitor a movie or show to make Kino stop searching for it without removing it from the library or deleting the files.

Show-level monitor policy

Shows have an extra knob, Monitor new episodes, set when you follow:

Setting	Behaviour
Future (default)	Auto-acquire episodes as they air, plus everything already in the season being followed
None	Track the show, don’t auto-download anything — useful for series you’re collecting manually

There’s a separate Specials (Season 0) toggle, off by default. Most viewers don’t want the bonus weekly shorts that some shows ship to Season 0; flip it on per-show if you do.

Quality upgrades

If Auto-upgrade is on (default), Kino keeps watching for better releases of files you already have and replaces them when one shows up that’s higher in the quality profile’s list. The old file is deleted only after the new one is in place — there’s no window where you have nothing to watch.

Turn it off in Settings → Library if you’d rather lock in the first acceptable release.

Library navigation

The Library tab lists everything you’ve added. Three controls shape the view:

• View mode — grid (poster wall) or list (compact rows)
• Sort — title, recently added, year
• Status filter — all, available, unwatched, watched, or wanted (followed but no file yet)

Kino remembers these per-device. A phone session and a desktop session can hold different defaults.

The search box on the Library tab filters titles already in the library; it does not search TMDB. To find new content, use the top-bar Search or Discover.

Detail pages

Each movie or show has a dedicated page reached by clicking its poster.

• Movies — synopsis, cast, runtime, ratings, the file Kino has on disk (with codec / resolution / HDR badges), trailers, and controls for monitor, refresh, delete, and rate.
• Shows — same metadata, plus a per-season episode list. Each episode shows whether it’s available, paused, watched, or still wanted. From here you can monitor / unmonitor individual seasons or episodes if the defaults aren’t quite right.

A small per-show “Show intro” toggle also lives on the show page — see Intro and credits skipping for what it does.

File layout on disk

Imports follow the naming templates from Settings → Library. Defaults:

{media_library_path}/
  Movies/
    The Matrix (1999) [Bluray-1080p].mkv
  TV/
    Breaking Bad/
      Season 05/
        Breaking Bad - S05E14 - Ozymandias [Bluray-1080p].mkv

Available tokens cover title, year, season, episode, quality, resolution, source, codec, HDR format, audio, release group, IMDB ID, and TMDB ID. The defaults work for most people; tweak them in Settings → Library → Naming if you have an existing scheme to match.

When a download finishes, Kino prefers a hardlink from the download location into the library so seeding doesn’t need a second copy of the file. If the download path and library path are on different filesystems, it falls back to a copy automatically — no configuration required.

Subtitles

Two sources, both automatic if available:

• Sidecar files in the download (e.g. Movie.en.srt) are imported alongside the video and exposed as selectable tracks.
• OpenSubtitles is searched if you’ve configured credentials in Settings → Integrations, when no embedded or sidecar track matches the languages in your active quality profile.

Forced and hearing-impaired tracks are flagged so the player can badge them appropriately.

Metadata refresh

Kino re-checks TMDB on a tiered cadence:

• Hot tier (~hourly) — airing shows, upcoming or recently released movies. Catches new episodes and air-date shifts quickly.
• Cold tier (~3 days) — ended/cancelled shows and older movies. These rarely change in ways that matter.

Force a refresh from a movie or show’s detail page if you want the poster, cast, or episode list updated immediately.

Removing things

Two flavours:

• Unmonitor — Kino keeps the files but stops looking for new releases. Use this when you’ve finished a show and don’t want search churn.
• Delete — removes the entry from Kino and (with the confirm dialog’s checkbox ticked) deletes the underlying files. Empty show / season folders clean themselves up.

Auto-cleanup deletes watched files after a configurable delay if Auto-cleanup is enabled in Settings → Library — handy for single-watch episodes that you don’t need to keep on disk forever.

Common issues

• Show added but no episodes appear — TMDB metadata fetch hasn’t completed yet, or the show is brand new and has no episodes published. Refresh metadata from the show page after a minute.
• Files won’t import — usually a missing FFmpeg / ffprobe (the importer uses ffprobe to read stream info). See Troubleshooting.
• Episode marked wanted forever — no release matches the active quality profile. Either widen the profile or check indexer health under Settings → Indexers.