🎬 obsidian-media-starter-vault

A focused Obsidian starter vault for tracking your personal media history — films, series, books and more.

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Why this vault?

I've tried tracking my media consumption in different ways — OneNote, Letterboxd, Goodreads. They all work, but none of them gave me the flexibility I wanted. I couldn't add my own notes or structure things my way. Since I already live in Obsidian, building a media tracker there was the natural next step. When I went looking for a ready-made starter vault I only found tutorials — so after building my own, I decided to share it. This vault gives you full control over how you track, review and reflect on the media you consume.

Example Vault

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Features

• 📥 One-click media import via the Media DB plugin — search for a title and it lands in your vault automatically with metadata, poster image and more
• 📋 Watchlist & read list — watch, read and history lists displayed via Obsidian Bases
• 📺 Movies, series and books supported out of the box
• ✅ Automatic watched tracking — mark an item as watched or add a personal rating and it moves to your history automatically
• 🎨 Custom dashboard — built with DataviewJS and CSS snippets, showing your watchlist and top rated media at a glance
• ⭐ Top Rated section — overview of your highest rated media by personal rating and unwatched media by online rating

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Used Plugins

Plugin	Purpose
Media DB	Fetch media metadata from external APIs
Dataview	Power the dashboard queries
Templater	Auto-apply templates on file creation

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Setup

1. Clone this repo

Create a new empty repo on GitHub (e.g. my-media-vault), then:

git clone https://github.com/resMagi/obsidian-media-starter-vault.git my-media-vault
cd my-media-vault
git remote rename origin upstream
git remote add origin https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/my-media-vault.git
git push -u origin main

This gives you your own repo to push to, while keeping the starter as upstream for future updates.

To pull in future improvements:

git pull upstream main

⚠️ If you plan to make your repo public or fork it, make sure to add vault/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-media-db-plugin/data.json to your .gitignore to avoid pushing your API key. For reference check out my personal media vault.

💡 Optional: If you want to protect your personal files from being overwritten when pulling upstream updates, add a .gitattributes file to your repo root:

README.md merge=ours
LICENSE merge=ours
vault/ merge=ours

2. Open as vault in Obsidian

Open Obsidian → Open folder as vault → select the vault folder inside the repo (you can rename it).

3. Enable Community plugins

Go to Settings → Community plugins → Enable Community plugins.

The required plugins are already included in the repo — no need to install them manually.

4. Enable CSS snippets

Go to Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets and enable:

• full-width
• media-dashboard

5. Add your OMDb API key

Go to Settings → Media DB and add your OMDb API key for movies and series. Get a free key at omdbapi.com. Other APIs are optional.

6. Start tracking

Use the Media DB plugin — click the ribbon icon or press Cmd/Ctrl + P → Add new Media DB entry — to search for a title. It will be added to the correct folder automatically with full metadata.

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How Watched Tracking Works

When you open a media entry you will find two key properties in the frontmatter:

• watched — check this checkbox to mark the item as watched
• personalRating — add a rating (e.g. 8.5) once you've watched it

Either action will automatically move the entry from your watchlist into your watched history via Obsidian Bases. No manual sorting needed.

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Vault Structure

obsidian-media-starter-vault/   ← repo root
├── vault/                      ← open this as your Obsidian vault
│   ├── .obsidian/
│   │   ├── plugins/            # Community plugins (pre-configured)
│   │   └── snippets/           # CSS snippets (full-width, media-dashboard)
│   ├── Media DB/
│   │   ├── movies/             # One note per movie
│   │   ├── series/             # One note per series
│   │   └── books/              # One note per book
│   ├── _templates/
│   │   ├── movie.md
│   │   ├── series.md
│   │   └── book.md
│   ├── lists/                  # Obsidian Bases views
│   └── dashboard.md            # DataviewJS dashboard
├── .gitignore
├── LICENSE
└── README.md

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Example Vault

Want to see what a filled vault looks like? Check out chronicle — my personal media vault built on this starter.

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Roadmap

• Manga support
• Games support

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License

MIT — do whatever you want with it.