
Show HN: A database for browsing and discovering movies - oldboyFX
http://www.movieo.me/
======
artursapek
Wow, after playing with it for 60 seconds my wife and I found a Humphrey
Bogart movie we had never heard of that we are now going to watch. You should
work on adding Amazon video links to it with a referral code, could be a good
way to capitalize on this!

~~~
oldboyFX
Amazon and Hulu integration is on our todo list. It's unfortunate that we
can't pull Netflix data since they're shutting down their api in 10 days.

~~~
PublicEnemy111
Netflix's selection is too limited for my taste. Your app looks beautiful btw!

------
manuelflara
Looks good, but the one feature that I find lacking (in this and other similar
apps, like [http://omive.com](http://omive.com)) is the ability to "hide"
movies I've already seen. Because otherwise I have to go through pages and
pages to find a movie I haven't seen, let alone consider watching.

~~~
oldboyFX
Multiple people said this, it's a shame how we didn't think of this before!
We'll be adding this feature during the next couple of days! Thanks for
pointing it out!

~~~
manuelflara
Awesome! Will check it out back in a week then :)

~~~
eterps
That would be great!

------
shared4you
Missing feature: Sort by language. This is especially important for massively
multilingual countries like India. Choosing 'India' lists hundreds of movies,
but I would like to sort it by language (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, etc.)

~~~
obviouslygreen
That's an interesting and potentially useful idea, but if you go down that
road, I think it'd be immediately relevant to also go into available subtitle
languages. It also really depends on where this site gets its data from, as
the "from [country x]" filtering can yield some questionable results.

------
stevephillips
Good effort.

Finally I can see and sort by RT rating which I trust way more than imdb.

You could also somehow link it to "popcorn time" then it will complete the
loop.

Also a separate section for "available on netflix" will make this
indispensable.

You could even add a weekly newsletter that shows... 1. new movies on netflix.
2. must watch classics etc base on my taste 4. new episodes of [walking dead]
available

and shoot it out on a friday :-)

~~~
oldboyFX
We'd love to include torrent links or even stream directly but we're too
scurred :<

The netflix is shutting down their api but we'll do our best go get their
data.

------
djrconcepts
This is pretty sweet, but wish there was a way to filter to show movies
available on netflix.

~~~
djtriptych
+1. I can't believe that still doesn't exist on the web. I have Hulu Plus,
Netflix, and Amazon Prime accounts, but nothing will answer for me "Can I
watch this movie for free somewhere?".

Filtering by streaming service is a killer feature.

~~~
smhinsey
With the exception of Amazon, who evidently weren't interested in cooperating,
Tivo does a great job of this. You get some Amazon content but it's not the
good stuff. For Hulu and Netflix you get unified search and you can do things
like come across an in-progress movie in the guide, see that it's available on
Netflix, and start watching it right away. I really wish Amazon would let Tivo
have a decent app with Prime support.

Edit: Sure enough, as soon as I posted this I came across an article saying
that Tivo will be getting Amazon Prime this fall, as well as Vudu.
[http://zatznotfunny.com/2014-08/amazon-instant-vudu-
coming-t...](http://zatznotfunny.com/2014-08/amazon-instant-vudu-coming-to-
tivo/)

------
netcan
Nice one. I'll definitely use this.

If you're looking to do something similar, this exact same app for books would
be welcome too. Also podcasts, audio content (recorded letters), music, etc.

Discovery is an interesting problem. Between mobile apps & google's overall
approach a lot of discovery seems to be based on giving you the right answer.
Sometimes what you need is not the right answer, but a good way of browsing. I
like filters and dials as a way of searching for things. It's fun.

------
lalwanivikas
It's good, but I recently found [http://omive.com/](http://omive.com/) and it
works great for me. Simple and very neatly built.

------
kshatrea
Just a tip, in case you find your way to adding it - while browsing through
the India selection, I find that there are movies from different languages - I
found Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil movies. My suggestion is that if you find a
way to add a language filter, in addition to a country filter, that might
help? This might be useful for others as well - for e.g a lot of Spanish
speakers might look for movies from South America etc.

------
lvs
Related movies seem to be based on keyword search primarily, unconstrained by
genre. But the keywords seem like sketchy content. Inception's keywords are
"loss of lover dream sleep subconsciousness defense mechanism redemption,"
such that the top related movies are "The Science of Sleep" and "Sex and
Lucia." Hmm... That doesn't seem quite right to me.

~~~
oldboyFX
Similar movies are pulled from TMDB API. We have nothing to do with it. But
you are right, in some situations similar movies don't make much sense. We
have to dig deeper into this and find a good solution.

------
obviouslygreen
I love the UI and the results! I'd just say that I have two concerns; while
the click-to-add nature of the genre list is great, I don't think it's
immediately intuitive. Perhaps I'm just part of the old "if you click a link
it takes you to a page" demographic, but clicking to add or subtract -- while
in my opinion the right mechanic here -- isn't immediately obvious. Making it
more clear how this works could save you some traffic by avoiding requests
from people who don't immediately understand how the UI works.

The second thing is that, on browsing movies "from Japan," I immediately get
_Band of Brothers_ , _Kill Bill_ , _Lost in Translation_ , _The Last Samurai_
, and the latest American reboot of _Godzilla_. If it's intended to show
movies _set_ in a particular country, that's potentially a really cool
gimmick, but as it is it seems inaccurate.

Love the site, though! Great work!

------
rahilsondhi
Login with Twitter doesn't work. After authorizing on Twitter.com, the "Please
sign in" modal just stays there.

~~~
PublicEnemy111
None work for me either :/ really bummed because my girlfriend and I were just
looking for movies to watch

~~~
oldboyFX
You can do anything except add them to a watchlist! We did some fixing, please
tell us if it's working now? It's hard to reproduce the error.

~~~
PublicEnemy111
sorry for the late response. It is working now! Thanks for the fast support

------
bgaluszka
Doesn't load main content for me in FF. Console says "SecurityError: The
operation is insecure." line 2 in
[http://www.movieo.me/assets/after_load/application-f2fa75b0d...](http://www.movieo.me/assets/after_load/application-f2fa75b0dcbe2e31d647144898b50bff.js).

~~~
ripb
It's working fine for me in FF 32.0.3 and Chrome 37.0.2062.120 (64-bit)

------
simonmales
Very performant on the front end. Impressive.

~~~
oldboyFX
Thank you sir. It might have been slower for some people since we weren't
really prepared for this amount of traffic.

HN rules.

------
icebraining
Great job. I like that you can combine genres, e.g. Science Fiction + Musical:
[http://www.movieo.me/?grid=grid_movie&file=movies%2F_movies&...](http://www.movieo.me/?grid=grid_movie&file=movies%2F_movies&rate_by=imdb_top&genres%5B%5D=22&genres%5B%5D=878)

------
leetrout
Potentially related- Vunify is a service for discovering and following
streaming content across multiple providers.

[http://www.vunify.com/](http://www.vunify.com/)

------
stevoo
One issue is that i am not able to actually login with Twitter or Google+.
Facebook seems to be working Google
[http://movieo.me/auth/failure?message=csrf_detected&strategy...](http://movieo.me/auth/failure?message=csrf_detected&strategy=google)
Dont recall twitters.

WHAT i would love to have is a way to mark the movies i have seen and perhaps
filter them out from the list ! That would make my life easier in picking up
movies !

Other than that, this looks amazing. Great work

~~~
oldboyFX
Hello! Could you please try loging in now and tell us if it works.

~~~
stevoo
Hey both of them seem to be working correctly now.

Just that facebook login has vanished

------
adi0x90
Great interface. How about adding a small trailer button on each movie preview
as well. Would save people time of clicking for a movie and then going for the
trailer. Just my thoughts.

~~~
djtriptych
Already there. It's the play button in the lower left when you're in grid
view, or the giant trailer button in list view :)

------
pd0wm
Looks good!

I think you have a small issue with the Rotten Tomatoes API, for example with
the movie Lucy
([http://www.movieo.me/240832-lucy](http://www.movieo.me/240832-lucy)). The
page shows a 96% audience score, while the Rotten Tomatoes website says 48%
([http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lucy_2014/](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lucy_2014/)).

~~~
oldboyFX
I noticed this aswell, it happens with audience score of some fresh movies
(less than 1 month old). We pull this data from OMDB, so we can't really
control it. We'll try to fix most of these cases manually.

------
alexbilbie
Just out of interest which data sources are you using?

~~~
oldboyFX
We use both TMDB and OMDB api's

------
Lichine
Really love the site and bookmarked. For an anime movie fan it's tough to find
a nice place that does all the things you guys do in a user-friendly way, so
this is epic.

Highest audience rated animation from Japan between 2000 and 2014? Bam, there
you go. That's how you help people. :)

So thank you for making this. If you need any extra help / feedback in return,
lemme know.

~~~
dublinben
That exact kind of search (and more!) has been supported on the major private
bittorrent trackers for years. They also have the benefit of offering all the
movies with a single click.

~~~
Lichine
Interesting. Thanks. :)

------
izzypark
The subtle UI stuff makes for a great user experience. Were there any other
sites that gave you inspiration for the user interface? I didn't know this
type of frontend UI was possible just using SCSS/jquery/coffeescript, hope is
alive again! Also, APIs just let you download all their data into your own
database? Thanks again!

~~~
darylfritz
I'm not sure if it was a direct inspiration, but the UI reminds me of Vdio
([http://blog.rdio.com/us/2013/04/introducing-
vdio.html](http://blog.rdio.com/us/2013/04/introducing-vdio.html)). I can't
link to the actual site as it has since shut down.

------
austinstorm
Where does the data come from? TMDB is a great source. Letterboxd has a
similar design and lots of curation features. Good job.

~~~
oldboyFX
Letterboxd is beyond awesome, their only downside is suboptimal browsing
experience. We tried to focus on just that!

------
nikeshhayaran
I like the way you guys locally storing the information about user's last page
and open it up when the user comes again.

------
cvan
very pretty and usable design. found some decent films already. overall, great
execution – compared to similar services I've used.

I like that it works on mobile too, but why does the page need to be reloaded
when I resize the browser width? upon resizing, I lost my scroll position and
I noticed the text all became red at tablet-ish width.

------
swrobel
Movies by Dan Gilroy is showing a random selection of films by other
directors: [http://www.movieo.me/director/57113-dan-
gilroy?grid=grid_mov...](http://www.movieo.me/director/57113-dan-
gilroy?grid=grid_movie&file=movies%2F_mobile_movies&rate_by=tomato_top)

~~~
oldboyFX
I see... we'll see what's up with this. Thanks!

------
bananaoomarang
This is really great, but it would be amazing if it had Netflix and Amazon
streaming availability filters.

~~~
switzer
Second this. Seems like the second most important thing behind the movie
ranking is its availability on Netflix, Amazon, AppleTV - e.g. I want to find
the best ranked movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

~~~
oldboyFX
We'll do integrations with other services soon. Netflix is unfortunately
shutting down their API in 10 days so... yeah.

------
monkey_slap
Awesome job. I'd love to incorporate your database into my movie app!
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moviedo-todo-lists-for-
movie...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moviedo-todo-lists-for-
movies/id856463297?mt=8)

~~~
oldboyFX
We don't have an API yet unfortunately. We got the data from TMDB/OMDB. You
can pull from them.

------
kbar13
cool!

Not really a criticism but more of a question as I'm not a designer by any
means:

Why do you only use a sliver of horizontal screen space in the middle?

I only mention this because it looks slightly unusual on my 27"

[https://i.imgur.com/rVxPCQG.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/rVxPCQG.jpg)

~~~
oldboyFX
We tried stretching content to 100% of 27" viewport but it looked too
cluttered. Imagine if you were reading a book where page width was half meter
long. I hope you understand what I mean.

We could left align it tho. Didn't really try yet. Thanks for the suggestion!

------
lucap
Looks great. My company maintains a similar demo site where you can search
movies by mood. For example, show me a funny movie that has some action in it.
[https://jaman.com/](https://jaman.com/)

------
_jb
Well done. I always have a very bad time when trying to figure out which movie
I want to watch, most websites have bad navigation / filtering capacities /
just unfriendly in general. Movieo solves that problem elegantly.

------
decisiveness
This is a really good idea, and a useful app.

Only suggestion: Number of ratings/reviews should hold more weight in the
sorting algorithm.

e.g. Hollywood Buddha (2003) shouldn't be the RT Audience Rating second
highest ranked film all time.

~~~
oldboyFX
There are two rate by options "Top Movies" and "Strictly by rating".

"Top movies" take into account the number of votes and use the same algorithm
as IMDB does for their top 250.

"Strictly by rating" does what it says. It sorts movies strictly by rating,
and only includes movies that have at least ~8 reviews on RT, ~25000 on IMDB.

~~~
decisiveness
To be more clear, I suggest that Strictly by Rating require a minimum number
of user reviews counted, and excludes movies with RT Audience reviews still in
a "Want to See" status.

------
EGreg
Is this being powered by freebase? I was surprised that the site wasn't user
powered - that is to say, it is basically a UI with filters to browse an
existing database. Tell me if I'm right.

~~~
oldboyFX
We pulled all data from TMDB and OMDB into our own database.

~~~
EGreg
Did you mean IMDB instead of OMDB?

~~~
brbcoding
OMDB is the Open Movie Database -
[http://www.omdbapi.com/](http://www.omdbapi.com/)

------
lenlorijn
Great app! Was actually working on something similar as a side project. But
you really nailed it! Awesome UI and great feature set.

Also I would suggest to add a random button. It's simple and a lot of fun.

------
phenomenon
This is brilliant. Loved the entire experience. Well done.

For Netflix I have built, www.flicksery.com to solve my own problem of
searching for good movies. Unfortunately the API is going to shut down soon.
:(

------
sharmi
Login with Twitter and Google doesn't work. After authorizing , the "Please
sign in" modal just stays there. I don't use facebook as a policy. So I did
not try it.

------
atmosx
This is wicked. It's slow, probably getting hammered by HN and/or has to
retrieve data from various online servers (imdb and whatnot) but it's wicked
guys, congrats!

~~~
oldboyFX
Yep, I feel bad for our server right now. We actually pulled all data (300k+
movies, 800k+ people) into our own database. If it had to retrieve from
various sources in real time it would have crashed long time ago. Time to
upgrade the servers and cache everything into oblivion I suppose :|

------
importantbrian
I like this a lot. The only thing I wish it had was links to which streaming
services I can go to to watch the movie, or maybe that is there and I just
missed it.

------
grimmfang
It's funny... I'm so used to waiting a few seconds for Netflix's tooltips to
appear I was very pleasantly surprised when I started browsing this.

------
whalesalad
This is beautiful. Add in information/filtering for whether it's on
Netflix/Amazon Prime Streaming etc... and i'd pay a small fee for this.

------
frakkingcylons
Beautiful website, I love the look and feel. One suggestion, I wish I could
navigate between movies with the arrow keys in the close-up view.

~~~
oldboyFX
Will be adding that feature tommorow!

~~~
tanveerhn
Came to request the same! Just curious, what's the stack and how long did it
take you to build this? I love the look and feel... I am having some issues
with signing in though. Twitter and Facebook oauth doesn't seem to be working.

~~~
oldboyFX
The stack is

backend: Postgre/Unicorn/RoR

frontend: SCSS/CoffeeScript/jQuery (no css/js frameworks)

We've been working on this for the past couple of months in our spare time.
TBH I have no idea how many hours it took.

The login was broken for some users, we think it's fixed now but were not
sure...it's hard to reproduce the error. Please tell us if it's working now!

~~~
tanveerhn
Just cleared my cache and tried logging in via twitter and facebook again -
still no luck. Nothing shows in the inspector either. Are you using any CDN
service? Might take some time to invalidate the cache if so.

It's pretty impressive that you guys hand-rolled the front-end, any reason why
you didn't go w/ bootstrap or similar since it's supposed to save you time?
(at least on paper) Personally that's what I tend to do myself but just
curious.

~~~
oldboyFX
I like to have full control over my projects. I have my own mini css framework
with all the stuff that I use regularly. I find bootstrap burdensome and
restricting.

Same goes for JS. Frameworks offer convenience at the expense of flexibility.
Movieo only has ~1000 lines of handwritten javascript... I'd never use JS
frameworks for such a small project. And I'd never use CSS frameworks for any
project ever.

That's my opinion, but I'm also known for hating on frameworks all the time
so...yeah xD

------
truncate
Cool work. I also liked the UI theme. Did you guys skin it yourself or used
some theme? I really suck at front-end that's why I ask.

~~~
oldboyFX
We didn't use any front end frameworks or themes. The "look and feel" of the
site was mostly inspired by the works from Julien Renvoye, Gilles Bertaux and
[http://letterboxd.com/](http://letterboxd.com/)

I tried to steal without copying.

------
uberneo
Have you got any technology/design stack used to build this .. looks very
clean and intuitive from UI/backend prospective ..

~~~
oldboyFX
backend: Postgre, Unicorn, Ruby on Rails

frontend: SCSS/CoffeeScript/jQuery (no frontend frameworks were used)

~~~
cageface
Good to see another example of a site that didn't have to buy into one of the
trendy SPA frameworks to build a nice UI.

------
darekkay
Looks great so far! Are you planning to open source it? I'm sure, many people
would be glad to contribute, including myself :)

~~~
oldboyFX
It's possible.

We didn't really expect this much traffic/good feedback. In the next week or
two we'll be polishing the site and adding some much requested improvements.
We need to collect our thoughts now and see what can be done concerning the
Netflix integration.

------
Technicolour
Could you integrate with trakt? That way I could filter out all the movies
that I have seen to better find recommendations.

~~~
oldboyFX
I didn't even know about trakt untill you mentioned it. We'll look into it.

~~~
darekkay
I discovered trakt a few months ago - it's great! They offer an open API and
store the imdb id for each movie, so it shouldn't be a problem to integrate
it.

------
silverdrake11
Metacritic support would be nice as well. Metacritic converts the scales for
each rater to a percentage and averages them

------
passenger
I want a service that i tell the movies i had seen and liked, and based on
these tells me what i might be interested in

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Like [http://www.jinni.com/](http://www.jinni.com/),
[http://www.suggestmemovie.com/](http://www.suggestmemovie.com/),
[http://www.tastekid.com](http://www.tastekid.com), .. or do a search for
"movies like ..." or whatever at Google, or do an advanced search at IMDB ...?

------
tmchow
This is beautiful, great work!

Small nit: top right corner says "Rate by IMDB" but I think you mean "Rating
by IMDB".

~~~
berdon
Or "Sort by ..."

------
Beltiras
Facebook sign-in doesn't work. Wanted to put things on watchlist, but didn't
want to enable Post to FB.

~~~
oldboyFX
We would never post to facebook on your behalf. The login wasn't working but
we did some fixing. Is it working now? It's hard to catch the error.

------
mrmondo
Good work, one thing I'll note is that the page was very slow to load on my
phone, it look around 40 seconds?

~~~
dubcanada
I suspect that is due to it being frontpage.

------
beenpoor
Look awesome! How do you deal with copyrights ? For example, the images or the
data associated with you display ?

------
oillio
Very cool. Thanks. One feature request: The ability to order by things other
than rating, like release date.

------
BonoboBoner
Fantastic execution. Enough has been said about the great UI. I am interested
in how you got all that data.

~~~
oldboyFX
TMDB/OMDB API's, crapload of scripts and lots of patience.

------
swah
Let me filter by RT score. Also, maybe always show the score? One could write
an extension for that anyway.

------
finishingmove
Do you scrape the data or get it from a web service? What do you use for
scraping in case of the former?

~~~
okanesen
The thumbnails are coming from tmdb.org, so I guess he's using their API.

------
jdnier
This is the interface I want on my TV!

------
oldboyFX
For those of you who couldn't log in, please try again now and tell us if it
works. Thanks!

------
rsivapr
If there was a filter for "Available to stream on Netflix", I'd be all over
this.

~~~
kolistivra
With an option to specify country, as different movies are available for
different regions.

------
wooyi
I'm impressed. I've already discovered a few movies I'm adding to my queue.

------
nyolfen
this is pretty but man is it bad at recommending similar movies in the
documentary genre. it might as well be giving completely random results:

[http://www.movieo.me/14002-baraka](http://www.movieo.me/14002-baraka)

------
johanneskanybal
Might be usefull for someone but expected much much more given the title and
the forum.

------
smortaz
bookmarked. very intuitive & easy to use. looking fwd to updates. some movies
are available for free on YT. perhaps they could be linked to. also whether
streamable on netflix/amazon/... would be nice too.

------
drewblaisdell
I'm tempted to steal your concept and build a version of this for video games.

~~~
oldboyFX
That's what I'd like to do aswell...

------
kyberias
I love the subtle zoom effect in the grid when mouse hovers over poster image.

------
AndrewKemendo
Very useful. Can you add links to amazon/hulu/torrents?

~~~
oldboyFX
We'd love to add torrent links or even stream but... you know... we're scared
:<

------
elwell
I like it. Might be nice to filter by MPAA rating additionally.

------
bhudman
I am curious... how do sites like these make money? Youtube?

~~~
oldboyFX
We make no profit whatsoever. Movieo is our side passion project.

We could make money through ads(lame, not gonna happen), donations(we could
add a button somewhere, but like anyone's gonna donate), amazon etc.
links(we'll add those to movie page).

Anyway I doubt we'll make any money on this. And it doesn't matter since that
wasn't the point. We just wanted to make something cool that people would use.

Also, we use free stuff all the time. Programming languages are free.
Frameworks are free. Sometimes it's nice to give back to community.

We'll be able to put it in our CV's I guess (nobody cares about those either).

~~~
carrotleads
Ok then have a look at these guys and you may get ideas on how to make money.
gyde.tv

------
skanga
It would be great to have a way to integrate this with XBMC

------
Meltdown
Good job.

Heads up... seems to be two <head> tags on your home page.

------
jypepin
this is pretty and looks pretty nice to use. I filtered by "France", and the
list actually got only 1 french movie out of 5-10.

~~~
oldboyFX
We are using data provided by existing API's, and it's far from perfect in
case of countries. Many hollywood blockbusters have numerous country tags. For
example if one scene was shot in france, or they partnered with french
production or something, it will include the tag "fr".

We have some ideas on how to make this more accurate. We'll be improving it in
the next couple of days.

------
roshansingh
This is brilliant, specially the UI. Loved it!

------
batrat
I love it! So awesome. Great job.

