ThumNet

Hi !

Very cool and usefull indeed Exactly what I needed for my own little htpc movie library. Only thing that worries me is that your webpage will be gone someday and I would like to incorperate your code directly into my project instead.

Any chance that you are goin to relese the code as open source ?

Featurewise I would suggest adding information about AKA for other countries as
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808151/releaseinfo#akas

and also if available information from
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234215/dvd including releasedate , upc code etc.

Br
Jimmy

@Jimmy
I’m currently working on a new version of the API. As soon as that’s done I’ll make a new post about it.

I’m thinking about going opensource…

But what I can do for now is give you some hints about how to get the information from IMDB.

1. Get the html source of the page you are interested in
2. Determine what parts of information you find useful
3. Build some function to get that information from the html source, these function s can use:
– regular expressions
– string between 2 other strings
– string position
– strip html tags
– etc

Hi ,

Good news

I have in the past used a few diffrent methods both my own code and others to parse information from Imdb , but noone of the as easy as yours.

XML works very well and is used by MyMovies, ThemMovieDb , XBMC etc to store and handle metadata about movies and what Im trying to do is a tool ( as of now only for myself) to have the same meta data for all. Most of the times I can find it via MyMovies but for new/unreleased movies I rely on combo of imdb and TheMovieDb

Br
Jimmy

Hi again!

Found that some movies doesen’t work with your service.

for example : http://imdb.thumnet.com/xml/title/tt1176724
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1176724/

Br
Jimmy

I’ll look into that!

Put it on mu todo list, will tell you when I fixed it.

Hi, great job. Are you using google to search in Imdb? Is it possible to implement some kind of error message when the parameter of the search contains wrong values (like http://imdb.thumnet.com/xml/search/Moulin+rouge!/)? Would be very useful

@Leonardo

No, I’m not using google to search IMDB, it’s i direct request to imdb.com.

About the error message: as stated earlier I’m currently working on a new version of the API and that will contain a summary block and a data block. In the summary block you have the possibility to check for errors that have occured.

Hi , found another little bug.

when searhing for the movie tt1492645 the xml response is missing the ImdbID tag
http://imdb.thumnet.com/xml/title/tt1492645

I use the imdbId tag to validate that the response I get is the correct one so I hope this is a bug and not by design.

Br
Jimmy

@Jimmy
That indeed is a bug, thanks for the pointing it out.

The bug occured because i search for the IMDB Pro link in the html
http://pro.imdb.com/title/

I thought that link would always be present in the html, but obviously it isn’t.

I’ll change my code to look for the canonical link tag
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1492645/" />

Hi,
first: great work. Simple, but yet offers useful info from the site. Keep up the good work

But I have a minor problem which is confusing me. Yesterday I started building a web app for the iPhone with some guidance from your demo on the API site. Everything went on fine: the JSON was correctly loaded and parsed, and in the end shown in the app. But when I uploaded my files to the server to test it on my device, it doesn’t work. I don’t get it; locally on my computer everything is fine, but not live from the webserver.

I inspected the headers and I got a 200 OK, but the response says:
“Failed to load source for: http://imdb.thumnet.com/json/search/star+wars“.

Have you any idea at all what the problem lies? The web server is an IIS.

Forgot, maybe you wanna have a look at the site: http://elever.utb.sandviken.se/web/elev02/hippo/

@Johan

I took a quick look at your site (with TamperData a Firefox plugin) and it appears you use the OPTIONS method to request the JSON. You should instead use the GET method to make the request.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I noticed the weird OPTIONS method too, but I can’t understand why that one is used! First I used jQuery’s $.getJSON() function, and now I tested the common $.get() function. These two shouldn’t produce the OPTIONS method, right? You’re using the $.getJSON() and that invokes the GET method correctly. I also noticed the headers are different. For instance, my “Content-Type” is “application/x-httpd-php5″ and yours is “text/x-json”. I’m a bit green on this stuff, but I find it strange that two so similar requests can be so different.

@Johan

Maybe the server you are hosting the code on does something weird… I really can’t think of something else. What is the method and the Content-type when you test your app local?

Locally, the headers are like yours in the demo. Every single one. It must be as you’re saying; the server does something it’s not suppose to do. After all, it’s an old IIS I used in school.. I’ll try to move the app to a friend’s server and test everything there.

Thanks for the support!

@Johan

You’re welcome, please post your results as well.

Hi again. Still haven’t got it together, even when I tested on a different web server. I can’t understand what’s wrong. Here’s the code to the necessary parts for retrieving data from the API, and that works fine locally, but not on the server.

http://pastebin.com/m24560940

Firebug keeps showing that it’s an OPTIONS request instead of GET. Why, oh why?!

Hi there.

Great project for sure, but is it legal? Since your software is public and not having any disclaimers (I couldnt find any), anybody could use your software for commercial and non-personal purposes.

Take a look here:
http://www.imdb.com/licensing/noncommercial

I wouldn’t want you, or the users to get in trouble for this

Regards,
nico

@Johan

Hi Johan, I don’t know why the request uses OPTIONS instead of GET, I also tried googling for similar problems but I couldn’t find a solutions.

Maybe another reader can help Johan…

@nico

Hi Nico, you have got a really good point there, do you have any hints/tips for me?
What should such a disclaimer contain…

@ThumNet

I’m not into legal stuff so I cant really help you with that. But bottomline is, users of your software should agree with your usage terms, which are something in the lines of not using it illegally and for personal non-commercial use only.

But there’s enough information on the web on how to assemble a disclaimer. But at first I’d take a look at how much of you application is actually allowed following IMDB’s terms. Perhaps even by contacting them.

And since you’re offering your software as a service providing someone else’s information, perhaps you should consider to provide it as a library. (That’s easier to cover in any disclaimer/using terms.)

This atleast is my interpretation of IMDB’s imo well covered usage terms. Good luck with your application

Hi ,

Any progress on sorting out the bugs ?

Br
Jimmy

Hi, Jimmy within the upcoming days there will be a new post with details about the new version.

Hey,

great job with this. it’s a really useful tool. I’m just wondering what other ‘encoding’ rules are needed to use this flawlessly? More specifically, besides replacing blank spaces with ‘+’, what other changes should we watch out for in our search queries?

Hi again , any news ?

@Jimmy
Well there is an update available, sorry for the delay!

It was ready a couple of weeks ago but….. I never to the time to blog about it.