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Formatted movie data availability?

  • I'm working on a site that requires a movie database. Help me find formatted data! I've spent quite a while researching different ways of obtaining a complete movie database. http://www.imdb.com and the http://www.allmediaguide.com/ offer paid services (approximately $3K/month) and would suit my needs perfectly. However, I cannot afford this, so my current plan is to create a fully functional demo site that I can show to investors to try to raise the money needed to purchase a subscription to the previously mentioned data. The question: Assuming there is no free database of movies available, where can I find a formatted (xml/csv/etc) large set (or subset, doesn't need to be complete) of movie/actor/director data? This data will be used only to show my site to investors and will not be made public. (Note: IMDB has data available for "personal use". This data is in the form of text files and doesn't seem to be in an easily parseable format.)

  • Answer:

    Does your demo have to display real movie data? How about http://www.benjaminkeen.com/software/data_generator/ of fake movie titles, actors, directors, etc?

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Have you considered using amazon's api to start with? It (their DB) may not be complete, but it is huge.

IronLizard

IronLizard: That was actually my first approach. It looks like they limit requests to 10 movies per call...I may have to end up using this but I'd like to find something more convenient. I also want to separate the idea of the movie itself from different versions of the movie on dvd. For example, using Amazon's API there's no way to tell that a widescreen and fullscreen movie are the same.

null terminated

In that case you are in way over my head, sorry.

IronLizard

Could you post a link to the IMDB "personal use" data (or post a tiny sample). When I last saw it (I've lost my own bookmark to it) I thought it was pretty easy to deal with - isn't it in the form of a CSV ? Python has some great facilities for parsing CSV - so great I might be willing to start you off with a script (written in my copious free time ;-) that you could use as a basis for pulling whatever you like (I suppose I should say it's > 1 year since I looked so my memory of what format it's might be wonky)

southof40

southof40: http://www.imdb.com/interfaces#plain is what I was referring to. Anything in CSV format would be perfect.

null terminated

OK will take a look, have to go and look after the offspring now - will respond in approx 12 hours

southof40

No, the downloadable lists from IMDB are not in CSV format. They are plain text files and the lists of movies are like this:Reservist Before and After the War, A (1902) 1902Reservoir Bitches (1994) (V) 1994Reservoir Dogs (1992) 1992Reservoir Dogs (2006) (VG) 2006Reservoir Guide Dogs (1995) 1995Reservoir Wolves (2001) 2001Reservoirs of Strength... A Burn Recovery Film (1990) 1990which if you look at the source, is something like Title, optional article, space, year in brackets, optional notation for things like '(VG)' == 'video game', as many tabs as it takes to make it line up, year again. What a mess. Plus there are all kinds of weird things going on with quotes and brackets when it comes to TV episodes.

AmbroseChapel

Having said that of course, if you wanted just to extract titles and years, that could be grepped out for you very easily indeed.

AmbroseChapel

Does this list (free for noncommercial use) contain enough information for your purposes? http://www.hometheaterinfo.com/dvdlist.htm It's not all movies, but it is movies available on DVD.

xiojason

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