Just a quiet reminder for anyone wanting to use this
Please refer to the copyright/license information listed in each file for instructions on allowed usage. The data is NOT FREE although it may be used for free in specific circumstances.
Minimum Price: We offer data licensing packages that are customized to meet your needs with annual fees ranging from $15,000 to higher depending on the audience for the data and which data are being licensed. We are not able to offer any sort of data license for less than $15,000.
The code's probably not very "pluggable" or "reusable," since that wasn't a design goal :). It's hopefully readable. Feel free to recommend a film (just search for it on the right sidebar).
I had forgotten how messy my tmdb API usage is. I'm using some guy's wrapper on pypi[1], as well as a manual fork (read: copy-paste-modify) of what I think is the same guy's github repo.
Although someone already commented and I am late to the party on this one I have yet to see xbmc using tmdb not find a movie I was watching. Sure IMDB can be considered more "complete" but tmdb certainly has popular mainstream titles.
that really sucks considering that contributors on the net built most of imdb. they didn't have anything like a cc license for user contributions back then
I believe the CDDB/Gracenote issue was exactly this; cddb built a massive database of cd's from user input, sold out to another company, which promptly closed it up and made it commercial. My memory may be wrong here, however.
It's this kind of crowdsourcing that I dislike. Mine the efforts of the people and keep the information to yourself. I'm mainly disappointed that because of this limited access, I can't have a better experience browsing the data on the web or in a mobile app. As it stands, both their site and the iOS app are slow, and the iOS app navigation just stinks.
I'm assuming most of the non-review/summary data is just fact. Presentation is copyrightable, but I don't think simple facts can be copyrighted that way.
In Australia at least, compilation of data is copyrightable, even where the individual sources may not be. Databases which you could argue are just fact but still restricted by copyright include telephone directories (Whitepages) and public transport timetabling information (which our state government controls rather tightly and won't even release to Google Transit).
Just an extra data point: public transit timetables for Western Australia's capital, Perth, are provided to Google, and any member of the public can download the same data from a website. Conditions attached but no questions asked.
Don't worry. Google will cave eventually, then everyone will be praising the bureaucrats that stuck to their guns to get a windfall licensing deal out of Google!
The point is that the data should be available to the public under a license such as Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 (used for other government data). Governments aren't about making a profit and I doubt Google will pay a cent for this data anyway when other governments are giving it to them for free.
We use it at the University in Oslo as a realistic database for practicing sql. It's great fun.
I remember one question. List the directors that have directed at least 20 movies and acted in all of them. This is fairly tricky, and returns a list of mostly explicit movie directors.
What's more fun though is a sparql endpoint. So you can query it and link to it on your own sites. I found this one on a quick google search (couldn't find the one I looked at before).
http://www.linkedmdb.org/
That sounds like a great example database for database classes! Something a student could wrap their head around to understand the dataset. I found a lot of times students new to database concepts had trouble unless examples were given in terms of a dataset they could relate to or at least understand the relationships without the DB language.
At Stanford in CS107 we had to write an IMDB six degrees of separation, using this same database. Insert the names of 2 actors, and our app will calculate the degrees of separation between them. Kevin Bacon was highly connected :)
Oh nice. Thanks for this. I downloaded the database for my own interest the other month, and after viewing the horrible format I gave up. I am going to check this out!
Hard to say. The page and the files both report recent timestamps.
The wayback machine saw the page in '96, has the windows version appearing between '97 and '00, and after that pretty much the only changes have been to the list of ftp servers.
Please refer to the copyright/license information listed in each file for instructions on allowed usage. The data is NOT FREE although it may be used for free in specific circumstances.
http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions which links to http://www.imdb.com/licensing/ and
Minimum Price: We offer data licensing packages that are customized to meet your needs with annual fees ranging from $15,000 to higher depending on the audience for the data and which data are being licensed. We are not able to offer any sort of data license for less than $15,000.