MDB: IMDB data for a folder of movie files. Sort by ratings/genre/runtime

Re:MDB: IMDB data for a folder of movie files. Sort by ratin... by click170 on Sunday July 08, 2012 @03:26PM (#4215376)

How do you interface with IMDB? There are two ways I can think of but neither would work well in this scenario. Option one is to download their offline dataset[0] which is huge and which you aren't allowed to distribute with your program so each user would have to redownload it. Option two is to scrape their site, which they don't allow but is possible. There is no API to my knowledge, I tried to write a similar app once before, and they refused to give permission to scrape their site.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/interfaces/

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Re:MDB: IMDB data for a folder of movie files. Sort by ratin... by seremoney on Sunday July 08, 2012 @03:36PM (#4215417)

Looks like the app is using http://www.imdbapi.com/. Check out "api_url" in config.py and the get_imdb_data() function in DBbuilder.py.

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Re:MDB: IMDB data for a folder of movie files. Sort by ratin... by nirvana on Sunday July 08, 2012 @04:28PM (#4215598)

This is confusing. On the imdbapi page, it says, at the bottom, its source is "Freebase" http://www.freebase.com/ and Wikipedia.

If I search for a movie on the imdbapi.com page, it has IMDB rating. IF I go to freebase for the same movie and search there is no imdb rating there (for obvious reasons, IMDB doesn't make this data available under any license, you'd have to scrape it[1]) The wikipedia page is very extensive, but doesn't have this rating either.

[1] near as I can find.

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Re:MDB: IMDB data for a folder of movie files. Sort by ratin... by legaloslotr on Sunday July 08, 2012 @03:35PM (#4215414)

Umm... well, there is this site http://imdbapi.com; which does the scraping (or maybe they have the offline datasets!), and then you can get json replies from them.

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Re:MDB: IMDB data for a folder of movie files. Sort by ratin... by waterlesscloud on Sunday July 08, 2012 @04:29PM (#4215602)

Their source is shown as Freebase, which doesn't have anything to do with IMDB. It's freely usable data as long as it's attributed.

I suspect they may have trademark issues with their site name, but their data looks free and clear.

EDIT: Nirvana has a good point about the imdb ratings. That may not be legally obtained.

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Re:MDB: IMDB data for a folder of movie files. Sort by ratin... by nivla on Sunday July 08, 2012 @07:40PM (#4216077)

I use IMDBapi and for one of my project and I can assure you that they are indeed scraping IMDB. The ratings, desc and the poster I get back is ditto to that of IMDB. It is a great service and I have also donated to them but as far as legality goes, not sure how they support IMDB's terms and conditions.

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Re:MDB: IMDB data for a folder of movie files. Sort by ratin... by jkbr on Sunday July 08, 2012 @04:26PM (#4215592)

In the footer:

  Source: Freebase, licensed under CC-BY
  Other content from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA

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