Automatically (OK, semi-automatically) retrieve IMDB data for your movies

Submitted by beforeseven on Fri, 07/25/2008 - 16:30

DivX Connected

I've written a small web application that takes a list of IMDB film IDs, fetches their data from the IMDB site and produces the XML metadata files that can be automatically read by the DivX Connected software when placed in the same folder as your movie file.

The metadata file will contain the movie's title, year of release, genre, a brief synopsis and IMDB rating.

I've used it to get data on well over 200 movies, and I hope you'll get some use out of it too.

I've posted it up on my blog, here:

http://stuff.beforeseven.com/introducing-divx-connected-metadata-generator

There's an introduction, instructions, and a link through to the app.

Let me know what you think!

Rob

I just made a simple Yahoo

Submitted by markm on Sun, 10/26/2008 - 12:36.

I just made a simple Yahoo Pipes webapp to take a movie title and return an IMDB ID.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=4trc8ouj3RG8Pwkz1b3fcQ&_render=rss&movie=Appaloosa

Any movie can be used in the URL. The pipe returns the IMDB ID and a link to the page.

If someone can decode the Connected database
( \appdata\local\divx\divx connected\db\01\connectedDB.db )
then they can get the filename and containing folder for each movie. Save the Movie titles in an XML and the Yahoo Pipes app can return the IMDB links, then when the IMDB metadata is retrieved, each file can be auto saved into the containing folder of the given movie.

AWESOME

Submitted by porfitron on Wed, 02/18/2009 - 10:35.

This is pretty awesome... I'll see if there some other fun things we can do with this feed, maybe even inside plug-is ;-)

Down?

Submitted by T0rm3nt on Sun, 10/26/2008 - 06:14.

cant seem to get onto the website anymore
is it just temporarily down?
i hope so cus i loved using it and i am only half way threw doing my movie collection :)

Has any one else had

Submitted by T0rm3nt on Tue, 09/16/2008 - 10:18.

Has any one else had problems getting this to work with the beta version

Thanks

Submitted by beforeseven on Wed, 08/06/2008 - 13:36.

Thanks for all your comments.

I'm hoping to add support for the individual episodes of a TV series soon, as it's something that I'd get some real use out of.

Hopefully it'll be useful to someone else too.

TV Series

Submitted by benkenobi on Wed, 08/06/2008 - 15:11.

Recently I've been thinking that i really ought to make the most of what my connected device has to offer and get my meta-data up to date in a nice orderly and consistent fashion both audio and video and the other day was thinking that (series) episode synopsis would be useful but again it would be a manual method unless an automated version was created...or modified from an existing script....;)

it would definitely be appreciated.

It appears that the device

Submitted by KacyMartin on Mon, 09/08/2008 - 13:34.

It appears that the device gets the thumbnail from a file associated with the filename of the movie (moviename.avi.jpg). Therefore you would have to generate another script to pull the DVD cover art from someplace then rename it to whatever you entered as the movie name.
-Kacy

Good stuff!

Submitted by Jpmcleary on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 17:06.

Hey, i tried this out last night and really liked it! Is there any way to get it to pull the picture for the movie poster too? I was trying to find a way to do this easier as well...

Right now I have all of those photos saved separately because I had been entering the metadata in manually...

Either way, this is the type of thing we need! Well done!!

Dunno!

Submitted by beforeseven on Wed, 08/06/2008 - 13:44.

Hmm, not sure, but I don't think so.

I don't think the meta data file supports an image field, so it won't allow you to automatically import these images.

Unless anyone from DivX has a different opinion?

When you edit the metadata of a video file through the DivX Connected software, you'll see that there are also fields for director and the year of release. I can't get these to import either, for some reason.