7 ms·

A fast, modern API for TV, Movies, Podcasts and more

35 points by codebeaker 14y ago

codebeaker 14y ago
I'm working on an API that doesn't suck that will represent TV, Movies, Podcasts, WebTV, and other forms of media. A stack-overflow inspired reputation system will reward community members to contribute translations, new shows, movies and corrections. Background workers interface with EPGs, other APIs and streams of data from other sources.<p>An image proxy server means openmedia.io will do the heavy lifting delivering images in the dimensions that you want, backed by a speedy CDN.
- carbuncle 14y ago
  For movies only (I understand that you service does more than just movies, but for my application this is currently irrelevant), are there key differences (benefits and weaknesses) compared to TMDb : http://www.themoviedb.org/ http://www.themoviedb.org/ Or just scraping imdb
- theallan 14y ago
  This looks really interesting for a project I'm working on. The license being used is obviously very open, but at the say time, does it effectively preclude proxying requests or caching returned results? Basically, if I wanted to offer the data from this system as a data layer to my front-end, would I need to hit your server for every request?
- ClayM 14y ago
  are you thinking about other forms of media, maybe something like comic books? there's actually a pretty large need for a comic api and there's only one right now (comicvine) that has been neglected for 2 years.
  - codebeaker 14y ago
    I'm keen for any media which is a) structured and b) is an essentially append-only dataset. I fear that existing APIs, through design and coincidence fail to address the needs of flexibly covering media of all types. Join the list, look me up, or feel free to contact me to discuss
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    I'd second this, there's distinct datasources for it (IIRC Diamond publish release dates for all titles they ship, which is practically everything in North America and England), but there's no way to consolidate it. Could create some cool tools with it as well.
codebeaker 14y ago
@carbuncle - If TMDB's licence allows, I can absolutely imagine offering the webhooks, and changes stream and a Movie type backed by TMDB. It's something I'll have to take up with their moderators. @theallan - It depends whether that would be a competing service under liberal interpretations of the law, when the legal chap has drawn up the API permission guidelines, I'll be sure to notify the mailing list. Under German law we have to be quite explicit about granting permission, but the beta list will be notified of the full terms of usage before the API opens. (My gut-feeling, no problem with using the data to back an app, that's sort-of what the data's for!)
- theallan 14y ago
  Super - I look forward to hearing more about it!
niteshade 14y ago
Doesn't trakt.tv do the same thing?
- codebeaker 14y ago
  I believe trakt.tv is the kind of service that might benefit from a simplified back-end system if it were to use openmedia.io. They likely use thetvdb, or epguides or similar now, or may even have their own integrations with EPGs. Similar services: * Web: trakt.tv, watched.it, watched.li, gomiso.com, getglue.com * Android: TV Series, TV Show Favs, Twee, DroidSeries, MyEpisodes I don't think that trakt.tv is really competing on an API level, but the data from openmedia.io would make building and maintaining a TV and movie tracker trivial.
  - niteshade 14y ago
    Yeah, they use TVDB as a source, definitely. I'm just having trouble seeing what your app does, mind explaining it a bit more?
    - codebeaker 14y ago
      The intention is to provide an API that requires little or no work on the part of the service relying on the data. Having had to work with thetvdb's API I can attest to having to download ~100 XML files (all languages…) in order to determine if anything is new, their API is often 2/3 days out of date, some internal caching problems and problems with scaling, they only deliver XML, poorly compressed (owing to key structure). I believe services such as trakt.tv and similar should be able to do one thing, and do it well, offer a to-do list of shows you should watch, and summarise what you have watched. And they shouldn't have to write thousands of lines of code to interface with an API for what's actually quite simple. In my (admittedly contrived, and not representative) benchmarks the JSON representing a typical TV series is 76% smaller, and parses 56% faster (that is probably representative of years of research and work into making fast XML parsers, and JSON being a relatively young format) Also, I find it strange that they don't provide a notifications API or changes stream. I don't want to call thetvdb specifically, many API and data providers make the same mistakes, if one can call a missing feature a mistake. (TradeDoubler, many financial APIs, etc) Another departure from typical API design is to accept that many movies, shows, books and so forth are provided simultaneously (or, close to simultaneously), world wide, in multiple languages. Therefore any API that purports to represent them must acknowledge that English isn't the default language, but it may have been the language in which the media was authored, and that airing dates, shipping and printing dates are worthless without timezone and language information. My goal is to make an API that is easy to use, and can open the creativity of the community up, by allowing something that is now rather difficult to become easy. To call out some of the problems I've tried to solve: timezones; networks; outlets (web); airing dates vs. availability dates (locale specific); actors vs. hosts vs. cameos; returning series under the same name; specials vs. pilots vs. shows about a series; treating different languages with equal weight; encoding (utf-8 naturally); gzip; msgpack... I'm sure there are many more which I've forgotten, but that's the gist of it :-)
lovamova 14y ago
Stop using Raleway as a body font. Please.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
> supported on every platform known to man. How about some non-sexist boilerplate?
- nanijoe 14y ago
  Not sure how the quote is sexist..man in this context = mankind, and No, I don't regard that as sexist.
  - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
    Maybe you could ask a woman what she thinks about a mass noun for humanity that excludes half of the humans.
    - sandfox 14y ago
      <troll-feed> I asked, In the small sample I questioned, not a single f* was given. Now troll off somewhere else, or alternatively actually make a useful contribution to increasing opportunities and interest for women in tech. </troll-feed>
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - nanijoe 14y ago
      You know..I just did, and she does not give a shit. She cares a heck of a lot more that her male colleagues earn more than she does.And that being of child bearing age somehow counts as a strike against her at her job. Maybe YOU should try talking to an actual woman and asking her what she cares about.
      - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
        How can we fix the big stuff - discrimination and pay disparities - if we can't even fix the small stuff like choosing to use non-sexist language?
codebeaker 14y ago
A word to the critics (thanks!), the copy has been modified to be less rhetorical and to be absolutely gender neutral. I've also switched away from Raleway as a body font, it looked a lot better on a retina display than on something with a more widespread resolution.
ashray 14y ago
I'm wondering about the kind of data you provide and what it's applications would be. Just to be sure, would this API somehow let me know if a new episode of say.. Mad Men comes out ? Or is it only for me to query info regarding a specific episode ? What kind of data are you going to provide ? Some examples would really help!
- codebeaker 14y ago
  One would be able to look up a complete representation of the current known state of Mad Men, all known airing dates in all countries, places where it might be available to (legally.) steam in your jurisdiction, etc, etc. These are all the features of a normal API. As well as access to the above, you could (selectively) register for updates to be pushed to a URL of your choosing when there are additions or amendments to the data held about the show. (or all shows, or all shows matching your criteria, etc)
victoknight 14y ago
Have you made any direct effort to integrate with home media solutions like XBMC or Plex? Edit: I would also very much like to see something like this in ifttt.com
- codebeaker 14y ago
  Plex and XBMC would be ideal candidates for this API, each user could easily maintain their own pointer to the data set, and their synchronisation would be faster and more efficient than it is right now. There's also a provision with the API (for personal use, so far) which turns a filename (and metadata, if you have it) into a JSON hash (or msgpack, of course) of the episode, show and season, etc. This is also a potential avenue for being more widely made available.
kreutz 14y ago
Do you see music releases being available on this at any point in time?

35 points by codebeaker 14y ago

I'm working on an API that doesn't suck that will represent TV, Movies, Podcasts, WebTV, and other forms of media. A stack-overflow inspired reputation system will reward community members to contribute translations, new shows, movies and corrections. Background workers interface with EPGs, other APIs and streams of data from other sources.<p>An image proxy server means openmedia.io will do the heavy lifting delivering images in the dimensions that you want, backed by a speedy CDN.

carbuncle 14y ago
For movies only (I understand that you service does more than just movies, but for my application this is currently irrelevant), are there key differences (benefits and weaknesses) compared to TMDb : http://www.themoviedb.org/ http://www.themoviedb.org/ Or just scraping imdb
theallan 14y ago
This looks really interesting for a project I'm working on. The license being used is obviously very open, but at the say time, does it effectively preclude proxying requests or caching returned results? Basically, if I wanted to offer the data from this system as a data layer to my front-end, would I need to hit your server for every request?
ClayM 14y ago
are you thinking about other forms of media, maybe something like comic books? there's actually a pretty large need for a comic api and there's only one right now (comicvine) that has been neglected for 2 years.
- codebeaker 14y ago
  I'm keen for any media which is a) structured and b) is an essentially append-only dataset. I fear that existing APIs, through design and coincidence fail to address the needs of flexibly covering media of all types. Join the list, look me up, or feel free to contact me to discuss
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  I'd second this, there's distinct datasources for it (IIRC Diamond publish release dates for all titles they ship, which is practically everything in North America and England), but there's no way to consolidate it. Could create some cool tools with it as well.

codebeaker 14y ago

@carbuncle - If TMDB's licence allows, I can absolutely imagine offering the webhooks, and changes stream and a Movie type backed by TMDB. It's something I'll have to take up with their moderators. @theallan - It depends whether that would be a competing service under liberal interpretations of the law, when the legal chap has drawn up the API permission guidelines, I'll be sure to notify the mailing list. Under German law we have to be quite explicit about granting permission, but the beta list will be notified of the full terms of usage before the API opens. (My gut-feeling, no problem with using the data to back an app, that's sort-of what the data's for!)

theallan 14y ago
Super - I look forward to hearing more about it!

niteshade 14y ago

Doesn't trakt.tv do the same thing?

codebeaker 14y ago
I believe trakt.tv is the kind of service that might benefit from a simplified back-end system if it were to use openmedia.io. They likely use thetvdb, or epguides or similar now, or may even have their own integrations with EPGs. Similar services: * Web: trakt.tv, watched.it, watched.li, gomiso.com, getglue.com * Android: TV Series, TV Show Favs, Twee, DroidSeries, MyEpisodes I don't think that trakt.tv is really competing on an API level, but the data from openmedia.io would make building and maintaining a TV and movie tracker trivial.
- niteshade 14y ago
  Yeah, they use TVDB as a source, definitely. I'm just having trouble seeing what your app does, mind explaining it a bit more?
  - codebeaker 14y ago
    The intention is to provide an API that requires little or no work on the part of the service relying on the data. Having had to work with thetvdb's API I can attest to having to download ~100 XML files (all languages…) in order to determine if anything is new, their API is often 2/3 days out of date, some internal caching problems and problems with scaling, they only deliver XML, poorly compressed (owing to key structure). I believe services such as trakt.tv and similar should be able to do one thing, and do it well, offer a to-do list of shows you should watch, and summarise what you have watched. And they shouldn't have to write thousands of lines of code to interface with an API for what's actually quite simple. In my (admittedly contrived, and not representative) benchmarks the JSON representing a typical TV series is 76% smaller, and parses 56% faster (that is probably representative of years of research and work into making fast XML parsers, and JSON being a relatively young format) Also, I find it strange that they don't provide a notifications API or changes stream. I don't want to call thetvdb specifically, many API and data providers make the same mistakes, if one can call a missing feature a mistake. (TradeDoubler, many financial APIs, etc) Another departure from typical API design is to accept that many movies, shows, books and so forth are provided simultaneously (or, close to simultaneously), world wide, in multiple languages. Therefore any API that purports to represent them must acknowledge that English isn't the default language, but it may have been the language in which the media was authored, and that airing dates, shipping and printing dates are worthless without timezone and language information. My goal is to make an API that is easy to use, and can open the creativity of the community up, by allowing something that is now rather difficult to become easy. To call out some of the problems I've tried to solve: timezones; networks; outlets (web); airing dates vs. availability dates (locale specific); actors vs. hosts vs. cameos; returning series under the same name; specials vs. pilots vs. shows about a series; treating different languages with equal weight; encoding (utf-8 naturally); gzip; msgpack... I'm sure there are many more which I've forgotten, but that's the gist of it :-)

lovamova 14y ago

Stop using Raleway as a body font. Please.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

> supported on every platform known to man. How about some non-sexist boilerplate?

nanijoe 14y ago
Not sure how the quote is sexist..man in this context = mankind, and No, I don't regard that as sexist.
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  Maybe you could ask a woman what she thinks about a mass noun for humanity that excludes half of the humans.
  - sandfox 14y ago
    <troll-feed> I asked, In the small sample I questioned, not a single f* was given. Now troll off somewhere else, or alternatively actually make a useful contribution to increasing opportunities and interest for women in tech. </troll-feed>
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - nanijoe 14y ago
    You know..I just did, and she does not give a shit. She cares a heck of a lot more that her male colleagues earn more than she does.And that being of child bearing age somehow counts as a strike against her at her job. Maybe YOU should try talking to an actual woman and asking her what she cares about.
    - RyanMcGreal 14y ago
      How can we fix the big stuff - discrimination and pay disparities - if we can't even fix the small stuff like choosing to use non-sexist language?

codebeaker 14y ago

A word to the critics (thanks!), the copy has been modified to be less rhetorical and to be absolutely gender neutral. I've also switched away from Raleway as a body font, it looked a lot better on a retina display than on something with a more widespread resolution.

ashray 14y ago

I'm wondering about the kind of data you provide and what it's applications would be. Just to be sure, would this API somehow let me know if a new episode of say.. Mad Men comes out ? Or is it only for me to query info regarding a specific episode ? What kind of data are you going to provide ? Some examples would really help!

codebeaker 14y ago
One would be able to look up a complete representation of the current known state of Mad Men, all known airing dates in all countries, places where it might be available to (legally.) steam in your jurisdiction, etc, etc. These are all the features of a normal API. As well as access to the above, you could (selectively) register for updates to be pushed to a URL of your choosing when there are additions or amendments to the data held about the show. (or all shows, or all shows matching your criteria, etc)

victoknight 14y ago

Have you made any direct effort to integrate with home media solutions like XBMC or Plex? Edit: I would also very much like to see something like this in ifttt.com

codebeaker 14y ago
Plex and XBMC would be ideal candidates for this API, each user could easily maintain their own pointer to the data set, and their synchronisation would be faster and more efficient than it is right now. There's also a provision with the API (for personal use, so far) which turns a filename (and metadata, if you have it) into a JSON hash (or msgpack, of course) of the episode, show and season, etc. This is also a potential avenue for being more widely made available.

kreutz 14y ago

Do you see music releases being available on this at any point in time?