Getting started with Cardinal Cinema
Cardinal Cinema is the app for watching the movies and TV shows on your Cardinal Media Server. It ships inside every Media Server bundle, so there is nothing separate to install, download or subscribe to: if you have a Media Server running, you already have Cinema. Your server prints its address when it starts, alongside the addresses of the Admin Dashboard and the other apps.
Cardinal also hosts a copy of the app at https://cinema.cardinalapps.cloud, which connects to your own server rather than to any library of Cardinal's. See Cloud-hosted apps.
Cinema never goes looking for content online. Everything it shows is a file on your server's disks, described by the names you gave your folders.
Getting content into Cinema
1. Give the server your movie and TV folders
Mount your folders into the container at /movies and /tv. The Quick Start compose file already has both lines in it:
volumes:
- PATH_TO_MY_TV_FILES:/tv
- PATH_TO_MY_MOVIE_FILES:/movies
Running outside a container instead, set MOVIES_DIR and TV_DIR to the absolute paths.
Both are optional and independent. A movies-only library is perfectly normal.
2. Name the folders so the server can read them
This is the step that decides how good your library looks. The rules are short, and they are in Movie & TV indexing:
/movies/Blade Runner 2049 (2017)/Blade Runner 2049 (2017).mkv
/tv/Show Name (2005)/Season 01/Show Name - S01E01 - Pilot.mkv
Files that do not match are still indexed and still play — they are collected in an Unsorted shelf, with the reason recorded in the run log.
3. Run an index
In the Admin Dashboard, go to Indexing, turn on Index movies and Index TV, and start a run. The run walks your folders, reads each video file with ffprobe for its duration, resolution, codecs, HDR format, audio tracks and chapters, and builds the catalogue. Without ffprobe, the same facts (except the HDR format) come from the file's own header.
4. Let the artwork job finish
When the run ends, the cinema artwork thumbnails job starts on its own and renders the posters, backdrops and episode stills. Until it finishes, Cinema shows placeholder tiles. Nothing else is waiting on it.
What is in the app
| Page | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Watch Now | Continue watching, next up, recently added movies and episodes |
| Movies | Every movie, sortable and filterable, plus the Unsorted shelf |
| TV | Every show, its seasons, and each season's episodes with your progress |
| History | Everything you have watched. See Watch history |
Channels, Playlists and Collections are listed but not built yet.
Required capabilities
Watching requires these capabilities on the user's role:
| Capability | Required for |
|---|---|
CinemaApp.Login | Opening Cardinal Cinema at all |
Movies.Read | Browsing movies |
Movies.Play | Playing a movie |
TVShows.Read | Browsing shows and seasons |
TVEpisodes.Read | Browsing episodes |
TVEpisodes.Play | Playing an episode |
CinemaGenres.Read | Filtering by genre |
CinemaHistory.Create | Recording what you watch, which is what resume relies on |
CinemaHistory.Read | Continue watching, next up and the History page |
CinemaHistory.Delete | Removing entries from your history |
The built-in roles already include the right sets, so this only matters when you build a role by hand. See Role-Based Access Control.
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