API IMDB

[mattonfire]

Hiya, I need to import data from IMDB. I checked their website and says we can use their API but need a Amazon AWS account which costs money.

Source: http://www.imdb.com/interfaces/

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?usedatasoftware

 

Then I looked forward for something called OMDB API which uses the IMDB API but this once against is costy - you have to be a patron. 

Source: http://www.omdbapi.com/

 

Could someone please help, I need a way of either using a API or scraping the data for a school project. It's for an application that recommends movies using some formulas, I need to be able to compare genre etc.

[Postremus]

Have you tried to use the REST API of http://www.theimdbapi.org/ ?

For example, https://theimdbapi.org/api/movie?movie_id=tt0241527 returns data which also contains the genre's of the movie.

[mariushm]

IMDB used to dump its whole database every week to a couple of FTP sites. They changed to daily exports and moved the export so that it's on Amazon S3 which means now you'd have to sign up for Amazon S3 and pay a few cents for the transfer from their S3 account to your account, and then pay a few cents to download the data to you or your website/scripts

 

Until the 28th of December this year, you can still download the weekly export from FTP sites, so if you only want to parse a snapshot of Imdb as of this week and don't need daily updates then you can use that and not worry about any api

 

See the FTP links in the quote below:

 

Quote

In our continued effort to best serve our Contributors, we are streamlining the datasets and making them available in a more useful and structured format in S3. Notably:
 

• Data refresh frequency is now daily (previously weekly). 
• IMDb title and name identifiers are included in all the files for ease of matching and linking back to IMDb.
• The files are in tab separated values (TSV) format.
• The sets of data we provide are updated to only include the essential ones that help with matching and linking to an IMDb title or name.
• To access the IMDb S3 buckets, users will need an Amazon AWS account.

As part of housekeeping the FTP site, we are deleting files we no longer update and are changing the directory structure. This will take effect next week. The list data files will be available at two new locations (see below) until December 28, 2017. Please note that the directory structure is subject to change without notice. We strongly encourage FTP site users to switch to the S3 solution at the earliest to ensure their applications continue to work without interruption.
 

• ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.imdb.com/pub/temporaryaccess/
• ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/misc/movies/database/temporaryaccess/

 If you are not an IMDb Contributor and wish to obtain IMDb content for commercial use, we offer a content license.  The license grants you access to our content via an XML web service, plus the right to use the content in your product or service.  If that interests you, please email licensing@imdb.com.

 

[jslowik]

Have you looked into the AWS free tier stuff yet? It could be plenty to get you through some school projects.

 

I've been running an EC2 micro instance, SQL Server on RDS, and a couple S3 buckets for a few months at no cost so far.

 

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

 

Also might be worth noting that if you don't need the posters from OMDB you should be able to use the API for free. It's been a couple years, but I used it for an android app for a school project.