
Show HN: TheReelBox, find tonight's movie - pkrein
http://thereelbox.com/
======
Sephr
Please don't try to guess where the location permission chrome will be. Also,
your site is completely useless if I don't want to give you permanent
permission to access my location. You should let users enter a location or zip
code if they don't want to give you live access to their exact location.

~~~
sskates
I'm curious, but why are so many people against sharing their location through
the browser? You already give up your OS, browser version, and IP address
(which can give a rough location) just by visiting the website. I understand
if someone personally has something against sharing their precise physical
location, but I don't understand why it's an issue for so many people.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
That's a huge difference. I keep feeling like there is this generation of very
naive programmers out there. Yes, it's true, the IP address can be used to
determine where you are on a mobile phone ... If you get a subpoena!

There's a big difference from "Sure, by using this phone, I know Homeland
Security can find me" and "I guess I will let every website I visit know where
I am; what the hell, privacy is a commodity!"

This attitude seems very strange to me. It is certainly in line with this "new
way of thinking about privacy" but it has really nothing to do with reality.

~~~
barefoot
I think he was referring to Geo-IP location (approximating your location based
on your ip address). About 60-75% of the time it's accurate to the city -
provided you're not using mobile broadband.

Of course there are a number of other ways to get higher resolution location
without consent. An older but commonly known one is Samy's XSS exploit
(<http://www.samy.pl/mapxss/>).

------
switz
Let me put in my zip code. There's no reason why I should _have_ to share my
location through the browser.

~~~
essayist
Yes, please. Plus - I work in DC, but generally want to see moves in Virginia,
so tying the search to my location is too restricting.

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aamar
Lots of neat stuff here. "Event listings"--movies, music, etc.-- can still
improve a lot in terms of ease of use, so I'm very happy to see people work in
this area.

A few thoughts:

\- I'd want more movie options & theaters (need a much bigger radius).

\- When a single movie has showtimes at multiple theaters, the action on the
map confused me at first.

\- I personally know where my local movie theaters are. I do care very much
about which theaters are available for a movie, because they vary in quality
and convenience, but I have to hover over showtimes to see the theater options
for a particular movie. So there may be a different UI which helps me optimize
my decision (e.g. with less emphasis on the map)

\- Title says "pick tonight's movie", but I can't actually figure out how to
see the showtimes for later tonight--movies with a lot of showtimes are only
showing the midday options.

\- Can ads be removed from the video trailer? Seems unpleasant to see an ad
during an ad. Also, normal video controls would be handy.

~~~
pkrein
all great ideas, thanks. the ads in the trailers are youtube's ads... so
probably can't get rid of those.

i'll figure out a way to show movie times further into the future, midday bit
is frustrating yeah.

~~~
Arelius
Can you hook into another movie trailer service? Perhaps Apple trailers? I
imagine that since trailers are Ads, there might be a service that provides
some sort of affiliate commission, or at least shows them without ads and
without fees.

------
breakall
The UI is very cool! The Google Maps window loads very quickly when hovering
over various show times. I immediately understood how this app could be
useful. I also like the big high-res trailers.

Using Firefox 10 on my Windows 7 desktop machine, I clicked allow on the
location sharing prompt, but the location it pulled was way off from my actual
location. I assume it's going off my ISP location. I couldn't find any way to
manually edit my location? I totally get the motivation to make it "just work"
without a bunch of input from the user, but it seems you need a way to allow
for fixing the location by the user.

Some of the locations it showed me movie times were quite far from me, which
is OK -- the additional options were fine. But the next question that popped
into my head when I saw the combination of a showtime and a location is "When
do I have to leave?" A read-out of "You need to leave at X:XX to be on time
for this movie" would be useful.

The placement of the "Get Tickets" link under each movie made it tricky to
move the mouse there from the showtime link I had settled on without tripping
over another showtime link -- kind of like that game where you move the ball
through the maze! Clicking the showtime link just took me to a blank white
page -- I assume this is not intentional.

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mshafrir
On Mac OS X + Chrome 19.0.1068.1 dev, I'm getting

    
    
      "Uncaught Error: QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR: DOM Exception 22"
    

on showtimes.js:677

    
    
      localStorage.setItem('zipcode', String(view.position.zipcode));

~~~
pkrein
hm, can't reproduce that here with the same setup... the address, latitude,
longitude and zipcode returned from google's geocoding api must have been
insanely long to exceed the 5MB quota. sorry that happened :(

~~~
catch23
Quota is based on domain, and in your case you're serving up everything from
dl.dropbox.com. Maybe these users already have stuff in their localStorage
from other sites that happen to use that domain?

Seems like the fix for that would be to serve up the html on your own domain
so that other sites, eg dropbox, won't mess with your quotas.

Also, that would fix the location permission dialog that says "dl.dropbox.com
wants to track your location".

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jlgosse
"We couldn't find any movies nearby."

Now, I am sad.

~~~
tnorthcutt
Same here. There are two theaters within 5 miles but it found nothing.

------
_sentient
This is a pretty neat idea. One thing I'd consider changing is your use of the
Rotten Tomatoes rating icons. You're using the Tomatometer Critics icons, but
the % score you're displaying is actually the audience rating. This may not
matter most of the time, but occasionally you have a movie like "A Thousand
Words" that has a 0% tomatometer rating, and a 60% audience rating.
(<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a-thousand-words/>). Mixing up the two
ratings could be a little misleading.

It may be better to just include both ratings on there, or stick with a single
rating source.

~~~
pkrein
Good point. The behavior is actually to use critics score unless the critics
score isn't available (0 for A Thousand Words triggered that), in which case
it falls back to use the audience score, if it's available. I'll think about
this a bit more, thanks for pointing it out!

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geuis
Definitely think you're on to something here. Contrary to other commenters, I
actually like that you're taking advantage of the geo location api. You should
include an option for zip code and/or city, but personally what you have it
fine.

Your UI is a bit bare, but nice and simple. Don't add too much to that. Simple
is good.

Also love that the trailer auto-plays, which is contrary to how I want to
experience video on _most_ sites. However, since your site is about movies,
auto-playing the trailer is a perfect implementation.

Ping me on Twitter, @geuis. I'd like to be informed as you further develop the
site.

Good luck!

------
itstriz
Where are you pulling the movie times data from? I've been trying to make a
local application but couldn't find an API anywhere, it came down to web
scraping, which isn't very sustainable.

EDIT: Is this coming from Yahoo?

~~~
Timothee
I'm curious about that as well.

I know of two companies that sell movie theater schedule datasets (through
data dump or API): Tribune Media Services
(<http://www.tribunemediaservices.com/>) and West World Media
(<http://www.westworldmedia.com/>).

I'm not sure that there are any other. It's my understanding that the main
movie sites (Google, Yahoo!, RottenTomatoes, MovieTickets…) all get their info
from one of these two companies. This is also probably why you won't find a
free API with that data.

Because the trailers are on YouTube, I suspected that the info was scraped
from Google (I believe these two companies have their own trailer hosting);
however, that would then make the connection between that info and
RottenTomatoes a bit tricky… Peter, do you mind sharing?

~~~
itstriz
From a quick glance over the code, it looks like the meat is in his showtimes
javascript
file([http://dl.dropbox.com/u/682022/showtimes/javascript/showtime...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/682022/showtimes/javascript/showtimes.js))

I'm not very familiar with backbone.js so it's a little confusing to me, but
looks like models are being built. Here's what I can muster, this could all be
wrong

* [Line 112] The trailer is using a YouTube API ([https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=json&form...](https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=json&format=5&orderby=relevance&max-results=1&q=)) and then the movie title?

* [Line 184] Ratings coming from RT API ([http://api.rottentomatoes.com/api/public/v1.0/movies.json?ap...](http://api.rottentomatoes.com/api/public/v1.0/movies.json?apikey=znxvjxy3t76468rdqukfxpp4&page_limit=1&q=<title>&callback=?))

* [Line 341] Theatres & Times from Yahoo (<http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=use> "store://VZHvlyU81L6BFVGyE7CNhT" as pterodactyl.movietimes; select * from pterodactyl.movietimes where zipcode="<zipcode>" and date="<date>"&format=json) -- I have no idea what this is all about. Any insight would be helpful.

* [Line 405] The links that Yahoo API thing returns are then rerouted to go through [http://www.qksrv.net/click-5632409-10576771?url=<buyURL&...](http://www.qksrv.net/click-5632409-10576771?url=<buyURL>&wssaffid=11836&wssac=123t), I'm guessing for OP to get some cash

Then there's google maps for the maps, so that seems to be where the data pull
is coming from. Not sure what the origin of that Yahoo URL is though.

EDIT: I added line numbers from the showtimes.js file because HN reformats the
links so you can't see them all the way.

------
alanfang
This: <http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity> is a much better way to find
someones location so they don't have click the allow button.

------
artursapek
Something to do with gamma.firebase.com and firebase.js isn't loading. I kept
it going for two minutes and it kept buttering the popcorn. Maybe HN shot over
your daily API quota?

------
jamest
This solves a problem that I have all the time. Existing movie aggregators are
a pain to navigate the filled with ads.

I like the Rotten Tomatoes integration. Nice work.

------
dlf
I like it, but it has my location wrong by about 50 miles. There absolutely
needs to be a way to enter the local address.

------
gee_totes
My user story: I got excited that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was still playing,
but didn't want to see it tonight because I have other plans. I clicked on the
link to buy tickets, hoping it would show me other showtimes, but it was just
a normal checkout page.

I would like to know when Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is playing tomorrow as
well.

------
vlucas
Good site idea, but my location is totally wrong and I don't see a way to
manually enter it so it is more accurate.

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tedmiston
It's nice & simple. I think trailers would be a great addition.

As an alternative -- I would be interested in a site just like this but that
aggregated movies from all of the free (legal) sources on the Web where I can
watch movies now. (I don't usually buy movie tickets in advance.)

------
ax
IE9/IE10 will have a goldbar at the bottom of the screen so the green arrow is
a bit misleading...

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stef25
Your green arrow is pointing at "learn more" and not "allow" so the link takes
me here
[https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...](https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=142065)

------
Pewpewarrows
Just FYI, your site is completely unusable for anyone working at a company
blocking Dropbox.

~~~
pkrein
whoa, i had no idea that companies did that? sorry!

~~~
Pewpewarrows
It's pretty uncommon, but it does happen. I'll happily check this out when I
get home though :)

------
PonyGumbo
Didn't work in Firefox even after allowing (the suggestion to "Allow" lined up
in Chrome, though). Loaded the site in Chrome, and no movies were found in my
area despite being within 10 miles of two movie theaters.

------
chrismanfrank
I love it. I go the movies all the time. I wish you had a way for me to put my
email address in so I could get an email every Friday to remind me this site
exists. Cool idea and implementation. Keep going!

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glodba
Because people like my self don't need the gov knowing where and how I move to
use this info against me due to my back problem and CUTTING ME OFF of suport
so I can't take care of my two kids...

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guynamedloren
Not working for me. After I click 'Allow', the page remains the same, with the
prompt telling me to click 'Allow'. I'm on Chrome 17.0.963.79, OSX, Austin TX.

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invalidOrTaken
Took forever loading on Android---I'm surprised how much that matters to me; I
just got a smartphone for Christmas and I'm already spoiled.

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simpsond
Well done! This fits the bill perfectly for me. The only problem I see is
requiring location access. It miscalculated my location.

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jkkramer
Nice. Slow to load, but worked.

I wish I could specify preferred theaters. In my area, there are many theaters
nearby, and the closest isn't the best.

------
dzlobin
Unfortunately, it doesn't load past the spinning popcorn for me, and I see
some failed GET requests in the network log.

~~~
pkrein
sorry we had an intermittent blip. working on it now.

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nollidge
GIANT pet peeve: please do not auto-play the trailer when I click on the
movie. Please. It is not expected behavior.

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true_religion
What it thinks is my location is not my actual location.

You should give me an option to enter an address.

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smackfu
Just needs a way to mark a theater as terrible and that I would never go
there.

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chadillac
sorting: "closest" "rating"

filtering: "start times" "location" (don't assume geo-log, let me enter zip)

neat idea, needs a lot of polish.

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tomjen3
This is not the fifties. Movies shouldn't be watched on tv.

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thehodge
guessing this is US only?

~~~
pkrein
yeah... sorry! i'm not sure where to even get movie showtime data for europe,
etc. ideas?

~~~
revorad
Imdb

