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

#1

Post by izac » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 1:39 PM UTC

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

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

#2

Post by kaolinite » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 1:42 PM UTC

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.

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

#3

Post by izac » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 1:54 PM UTC

kaolinite wrote: post #2

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.

Thanks, I'll put that in the to-do list :)

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

#4

Post by larrydavid » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 2:03 PM UTC

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) instead, I'll have to check that out.

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

#5

Post by bambax » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 2:04 PM UTC

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.

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

#6

Post by rlx0x » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 2:12 PM UTC

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/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/interfaces [3] http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions

(edit: forgot a link)

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

#7

Post by vanwilder77 » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 2:14 PM UTC

I really did need something like this, but never thought of making of something!

Anyways looking forward to use this tool!

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

#8

Post by nivla » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 2:17 PM UTC

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.

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

#9

Post by Adirael » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 2:32 PM UTC

larrydavid wrote: post #4

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 ) instead, I'll have to check that out.

IMDB has an API, but it's not free.

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

#10

Post by ans » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 2:35 PM UTC

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?