Connecting to IMDB

Question

Has any one done this before? It would seem to me that there should be a webservice but i can't find one. I am writing an application for personal use that would just show basic info from IMDB.

Answer 1

The libraries for IMDb seem quite unreliable at present and highly inefficient. I really wish IMDb would just create a webservice.

After a bit of searching I found a reasonable alternative to IMDb. It provides all the basic information such as overview, year, ratings, posters, trailers etc.:

The Movie Database (TMDb).

It provides a webservice with wrappers for several languages and seems reliable so far. The search results have been, for myself, more accurate as well.

Answer 2

There is no webservice available.

But there are enough html scrapers written in every language to suit your needs!

I've used the .NET 3.5 Imdb Services opensource project in a few personal projects.

1 minute google results:

• Perl: IMDB-Film
• Ruby: libimdb-ruby
• Python: IMDbPY

Answer 3

The only "API" the IMDb publishes is a set of plain-text data files containing formatted lists of actors, directors, movies, etc. You would likely need to write your own parser unless somebody has released one for your language. Try Google searches like "imdb api" and "imdb parser".

A screen scraper might be useful, but they specifically prohibit scrapers in their terms of use.