6 ms·

Show HN: I made a CLI to retrieve info from the IMDB

61 points by izac 14y ago

kaolinite 14y ago
Pulling down URLs to images would be a really cool and useful addition. Good work though, looks great - will probably end up using this at some point.
- izac 14y ago
  Thanks, I'll put that in the to-do list :)
larrydavid 14y ago
Nice work. I see IMDB still don't have an API. I wrote a little movie comparison web app in the past and had to resort to screen scraping IMDB too. Rotten Tomatoes on the other hand seems to embrace developers a lot more and has an excellent API. EDIT: Just realised you aren't actually screen scraping IMDB but using OMDB API (http://www.omdbapi.com http://www.omdbapi.com) instead, I'll have to check that out.
- Adirael 14y ago
  IMDB has an API, but it's not free.
- draegtun 14y ago
  IMDb do have an API, for eg. app.imdb.com, however this is meant for mobile applications and it can only be used if authorized in writing(!) by IMDb. On CPAN there is WebService::IMDB module which uses this mobile API. Also there is IMBDB::File but (i believe) this works by web scraping IMDb website. cpan links: - https://metacpan.org/module/WebService::IMDB https://metacpan.org/module/WebService::IMDB - https://metacpan.org/module/IMDB::Film https://metacpan.org/module/IMDB::Film
  - larrydavid 14y ago
    Nice, thanks for the detailed post.
bambax 14y ago
I hade made something similar in the form of a Chrome app/extension: you pasted lists of movie titles in a textarea and it retrieved basic information from IMDb about those titles. What I had learned was that full text search on IMDb is of very poor quality and returns all sorts of crap; I ended up searching on Google to get the imdbId, and return to IMDb with that Id to get movie data.
rlx0x 14y ago
I feel like I must mention the IMDBpy[1] project, its a mature framework/api to access IMDB via the web or to build a local database based on the flatfiles[2] imdb make available ;) IMDB itself don't provide a (free) API and webscraping is explicitly forbidden in their TOS[3], so don't start building a service around that;) [1] http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/ http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/interfaces http://www.imdb.com/interfaces [3] http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions (edit: forgot a link)
vanwilder77 14y ago
I really did need something like this, but never thought of making of something! Anyways looking forward to use this tool!
nivla 14y ago
Interesting, but you are not the pulling information from Imdb, according to the source code it is using omdbapi.com an independent site which used to be imdbapi.com until amazon issued them a C&D. Keep in mind OmdbApi states that it uses all other resources except IMDB to compile its data, so you may not find some movies/information only found in IMDB. Regardless, thank you open sourcing your work.
- izac 14y ago
  Yup, sorry if I didn't make that clear enough.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > omdbapi.com an independent site which used to be imdbapi.com until amazon issued them a C&D. How's omdbapi.com avoiding a C&D as well?
  - nivla 14y ago
    Omdbapi.com doesn't have the trademarked "imdb" word in their domain, they also seem to use wikipedia and freebase as their source. Similar to how "Scroogle.org" stayed away from violating Google's trademark.
ans 14y ago
Big deal. IMDb being older than some people here, I'm sure the first such client was created at least 18 years ago? I guess I'm just saying, who cares about your little 49 sloc toy script?
lkj32l5kj32lk5 14y ago
nobody cares asshole
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  Why would you post this? He's open sourced his work and made something that will at least serve as learning material for python developers. There's no need to be crabby.
  - rlx0x 14y ago
    although I do agree, I still wonder if a generic 62 line python script is worth this much attention.
mushfiq 14y ago
I wrote almost same script(https://gist.github.com/1918439 https://gist.github.com/1918439) last year,here is the blog post(http://mushfiq.com/2012/03/13/python-movie-data-crawler/ http://mushfiq.com/2012/03/13/python-movie-data-crawler/)
hoov 14y ago
Nice work. Just a couple of Python tips in case you wanted them. - Embrace PEP8 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/). It'll help other developers work with your code. - argparse.ArgumentParser has a parse_args method, so you don't have to mess around with sys.argv
- izac 14y ago
  Much appreciated, thanks.
allenwlee 14y ago
Very interesting. we've been using TMDB.org for our site filmquotra.com but are not tied to it. how do you distinguish yourself from tmdb?
- pyre 14y ago
  > how do you distinguish yourself from tmdb This is a command-line program for accessing movie information (via someone else's web API), not movie database system. Asking how he/she distinguishes his/herself from TheMovieDB, is... a little odd. It would be like asking XBMC how they distinguish themselves from IMDB.
  - allenwlee 14y ago
    thanks...i barely even understood your response to be honest...i'm not a programmer but trying to learn. love rentrak--i've been talking to someone there for a while now regarding a data feed.
    - pyre 14y ago
      > i barely even understood your response to be honest - IMDB & TMDB are collections of movie data. - XBMC (aka XBox Media Center) is a piece of software that plays videos and will grab information about those videos from IMDB or TMDB to display to the user (e.g. when you're watching a movie, it will show you a synopsis of the movie, boxart, etc grabbed from the web). - This post is just about a program that will allow you to say "I want information about a movie called A Christmas Story " and it will fetch that information from the web, and display it. The only real benefit of this, is being able to do the query/view the response from a text terminal, instead of just going to the website.
pinks 14y ago
Very cool! I wrote a similar Python script (https://github.com/Pinkerton/Scripts/tree/master/Filmsy https://github.com/Pinkerton/Scripts/tree/master/Filmsy) to find common actors between movies. It basically acts as a Python API wrapper for omdbapi.com. I made it because I found a simple webapp at one point that did this, but forgot to bookmark it and never found it again.
SageRaven 14y ago
It's funny, this brings IMDB almost full-circle to its origins. Back in the early 90s it was first this huge text file distributed via usenet and ftp. I remember contributing a few points of a trivia about T2: Judgement Day, one being the mirror of Arnold's "Get out." line to the trucker in Terminator to Robert Patrick delivering the same to the helicopter pilot in T2. Later on, after the volume of data was becoming unwieldy for a flat text file, it was converted to a MS-DOS based database system. You'd download a ton of archive files, unpack them, then run a binary that would allow you to query things like title, year, actor. One of the best features from those days (and maybe the very early web-based IMDB) was you could say, "show me actors that were common to these 2 movies" (or maybe it was "given these 2 actors, show me movies they both starred in" -- or maybe both). I sorely miss those days of a community-driven IMDB. I was truly saddened when it "sold out" and became a more-or-less commercial portal.
- jspiros 14y ago
  You can still access the data files for private use, see http://www.imdb.com/interfaces http://www.imdb.com/interfaces. Unfortunately, the data has a restrictive license. Though, I'm not sure if that entirely holds, as I believe there are limitations (at least in the United States) to having copyright on compilations of factual data.
- e12e 14y ago
  While afaik not as complete, there's also http://www.themoviedb.org/ http://www.themoviedb.org/ The main thing missing night be the ability to identify movies uniquely by imbd id... Something that can be very nice while searching.
- rictic 14y ago
  For some of this stuff you can use Freebase, which has an awesome queryable JSON API and a very open and permissive license. Our movie data is quite good for structured information, though not so much for unstructured trivia. [Disclosure, I work on Freebase for Google.]
- tomjakubowski 14y ago
  IMDB still has a common cast search feature, offering both "show me the actors common to these two movies" and "show me the movies common to these two actors": http://www.imdb.com/search/common http://www.imdb.com/search/common
tsm 14y ago
What's with the recent trend to use aliases instead of proper installation? (c.f. datafart, on the frontpage yesterday) mv terminalIMDB.py ~/bin/imdb chmod +x ~/bin/imdb
- josegonzalez 14y ago
  People don't know how to actually make a python package. It's not hard.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- deanclatworthy 14y ago
  Would the benefit of doing it the author's way be that you can check out new versions from git without having to move the python script to /bin every or /usr/local/bin every time you get a new version.
  - tsm 14y ago
    I guess. But that could also be accomplished with a symlink, no?
jzwinck 14y ago
Had you previously noticed https://github.com/bgr/imdb-cli https://github.com/bgr/imdb-cli ? Can you tell us how yours differs from that and other IMDB CLI programs that have come before?
deanclatworthy 14y ago
Looks good. I made http://www.deanclatworthy.com/imdb/ http://www.deanclatworthy.com/imdb/ if anyone is interested too. Feel free to add it to your library.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Can you either charge for this or release it as OSS?
  - deanclatworthy 14y ago
    I doubt IMDB would be happy if I charged for it ;) I won't OS it for legal reasons (see what happened to imdbapi.com)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
MateusCaruccio 14y ago
IMDB app is the new hello world ;) There is mine: https://github.com/caruccio/pymdb https://github.com/caruccio/pymdb

61 points by izac 14y ago

Pulling down URLs to images would be a really cool and useful addition. Good work though, looks great - will probably end up using this at some point.

izac 14y ago
Thanks, I'll put that in the to-do list :)

larrydavid 14y ago

Nice work. I see IMDB still don't have an API. I wrote a little movie comparison web app in the past and had to resort to screen scraping IMDB too. Rotten Tomatoes on the other hand seems to embrace developers a lot more and has an excellent API. EDIT: Just realised you aren't actually screen scraping IMDB but using OMDB API (http://www.omdbapi.com http://www.omdbapi.com) instead, I'll have to check that out.

Adirael 14y ago
IMDB has an API, but it's not free.
draegtun 14y ago
IMDb do have an API, for eg. app.imdb.com, however this is meant for mobile applications and it can only be used if authorized in writing(!) by IMDb. On CPAN there is WebService::IMDB module which uses this mobile API. Also there is IMBDB::File but (i believe) this works by web scraping IMDb website. cpan links: - https://metacpan.org/module/WebService::IMDB https://metacpan.org/module/WebService::IMDB - https://metacpan.org/module/IMDB::Film https://metacpan.org/module/IMDB::Film
- larrydavid 14y ago
  Nice, thanks for the detailed post.

bambax 14y ago

I hade made something similar in the form of a Chrome app/extension: you pasted lists of movie titles in a textarea and it retrieved basic information from IMDb about those titles. What I had learned was that full text search on IMDb is of very poor quality and returns all sorts of crap; I ended up searching on Google to get the imdbId, and return to IMDb with that Id to get movie data.

rlx0x 14y ago

I feel like I must mention the IMDBpy[1] project, its a mature framework/api to access IMDB via the web or to build a local database based on the flatfiles[2] imdb make available ;) IMDB itself don't provide a (free) API and webscraping is explicitly forbidden in their TOS[3], so don't start building a service around that;) [1] http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/ http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/interfaces http://www.imdb.com/interfaces [3] http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions (edit: forgot a link)

vanwilder77 14y ago

I really did need something like this, but never thought of making of something! Anyways looking forward to use this tool!

nivla 14y ago

Interesting, but you are not the pulling information from Imdb, according to the source code it is using omdbapi.com an independent site which used to be imdbapi.com until amazon issued them a C&D. Keep in mind OmdbApi states that it uses all other resources except IMDB to compile its data, so you may not find some movies/information only found in IMDB. Regardless, thank you open sourcing your work.

izac 14y ago
Yup, sorry if I didn't make that clear enough.
w1ntermute 14y ago
> omdbapi.com an independent site which used to be imdbapi.com until amazon issued them a C&D. How's omdbapi.com avoiding a C&D as well?
- nivla 14y ago
  Omdbapi.com doesn't have the trademarked "imdb" word in their domain, they also seem to use wikipedia and freebase as their source. Similar to how "Scroogle.org" stayed away from violating Google's trademark.

ans 14y ago

Big deal. IMDb being older than some people here, I'm sure the first such client was created at least 18 years ago? I guess I'm just saying, who cares about your little 49 sloc toy script?

lkj32l5kj32lk5 14y ago

nobody cares asshole

sergiotapia 14y ago
Why would you post this? He's open sourced his work and made something that will at least serve as learning material for python developers. There's no need to be crabby.
- rlx0x 14y ago
  although I do agree, I still wonder if a generic 62 line python script is worth this much attention.

mushfiq 14y ago

I wrote almost same script(https://gist.github.com/1918439 https://gist.github.com/1918439) last year,here is the blog post(http://mushfiq.com/2012/03/13/python-movie-data-crawler/ http://mushfiq.com/2012/03/13/python-movie-data-crawler/)

hoov 14y ago

Nice work. Just a couple of Python tips in case you wanted them. - Embrace PEP8 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/). It'll help other developers work with your code. - argparse.ArgumentParser has a parse_args method, so you don't have to mess around with sys.argv

izac 14y ago
Much appreciated, thanks.

allenwlee 14y ago

Very interesting. we've been using TMDB.org for our site filmquotra.com but are not tied to it. how do you distinguish yourself from tmdb?

pyre 14y ago
> how do you distinguish yourself from tmdb This is a command-line program for accessing movie information (via someone else's web API), not movie database system. Asking how he/she distinguishes his/herself from TheMovieDB, is... a little odd. It would be like asking XBMC how they distinguish themselves from IMDB.
- allenwlee 14y ago
  thanks...i barely even understood your response to be honest...i'm not a programmer but trying to learn. love rentrak--i've been talking to someone there for a while now regarding a data feed.
  - pyre 14y ago
    > i barely even understood your response to be honest - IMDB & TMDB are collections of movie data. - XBMC (aka XBox Media Center) is a piece of software that plays videos and will grab information about those videos from IMDB or TMDB to display to the user (e.g. when you're watching a movie, it will show you a synopsis of the movie, boxart, etc grabbed from the web). - This post is just about a program that will allow you to say "I want information about a movie called A Christmas Story " and it will fetch that information from the web, and display it. The only real benefit of this, is being able to do the query/view the response from a text terminal, instead of just going to the website.

pinks 14y ago

Very cool! I wrote a similar Python script (https://github.com/Pinkerton/Scripts/tree/master/Filmsy https://github.com/Pinkerton/Scripts/tree/master/Filmsy) to find common actors between movies. It basically acts as a Python API wrapper for omdbapi.com. I made it because I found a simple webapp at one point that did this, but forgot to bookmark it and never found it again.

SageRaven 14y ago

It's funny, this brings IMDB almost full-circle to its origins. Back in the early 90s it was first this huge text file distributed via usenet and ftp. I remember contributing a few points of a trivia about T2: Judgement Day, one being the mirror of Arnold's "Get out." line to the trucker in Terminator to Robert Patrick delivering the same to the helicopter pilot in T2. Later on, after the volume of data was becoming unwieldy for a flat text file, it was converted to a MS-DOS based database system. You'd download a ton of archive files, unpack them, then run a binary that would allow you to query things like title, year, actor. One of the best features from those days (and maybe the very early web-based IMDB) was you could say, "show me actors that were common to these 2 movies" (or maybe it was "given these 2 actors, show me movies they both starred in" -- or maybe both). I sorely miss those days of a community-driven IMDB. I was truly saddened when it "sold out" and became a more-or-less commercial portal.

jspiros 14y ago
You can still access the data files for private use, see http://www.imdb.com/interfaces http://www.imdb.com/interfaces. Unfortunately, the data has a restrictive license. Though, I'm not sure if that entirely holds, as I believe there are limitations (at least in the United States) to having copyright on compilations of factual data.
e12e 14y ago
While afaik not as complete, there's also http://www.themoviedb.org/ http://www.themoviedb.org/ The main thing missing night be the ability to identify movies uniquely by imbd id... Something that can be very nice while searching.
rictic 14y ago
For some of this stuff you can use Freebase, which has an awesome queryable JSON API and a very open and permissive license. Our movie data is quite good for structured information, though not so much for unstructured trivia. [Disclosure, I work on Freebase for Google.]
tomjakubowski 14y ago
IMDB still has a common cast search feature, offering both "show me the actors common to these two movies" and "show me the movies common to these two actors": http://www.imdb.com/search/common http://www.imdb.com/search/common

tsm 14y ago

What's with the recent trend to use aliases instead of proper installation? (c.f. datafart, on the frontpage yesterday) mv terminalIMDB.py ~/bin/imdb chmod +x ~/bin/imdb

josegonzalez 14y ago
People don't know how to actually make a python package. It's not hard.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
deanclatworthy 14y ago
Would the benefit of doing it the author's way be that you can check out new versions from git without having to move the python script to /bin every or /usr/local/bin every time you get a new version.
- tsm 14y ago
  I guess. But that could also be accomplished with a symlink, no?

jzwinck 14y ago

Had you previously noticed https://github.com/bgr/imdb-cli https://github.com/bgr/imdb-cli ? Can you tell us how yours differs from that and other IMDB CLI programs that have come before?

deanclatworthy 14y ago

Looks good. I made http://www.deanclatworthy.com/imdb/ http://www.deanclatworthy.com/imdb/ if anyone is interested too. Feel free to add it to your library.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Can you either charge for this or release it as OSS?
- deanclatworthy 14y ago
  I doubt IMDB would be happy if I charged for it ;) I won't OS it for legal reasons (see what happened to imdbapi.com)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

MateusCaruccio 14y ago

IMDB app is the new hello world ;) There is mine: https://github.com/caruccio/pymdb https://github.com/caruccio/pymdb