IMDB Pack Suggestion

It would be nice to see IMDB or something alike to be added as a pack for a movie list.

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that would be brilliant!

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Working on this now - what kind of data would you like to see? Primarily auto-populating data about a movie such as poster, year, runtime, top-billed cast?

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@Nick_HE : Title, year, genre, runtime, poster, rating, country and language (of origin), director, cast… :grin: !

Thank you very much in advance @Nick_HE :raised_hands: :grin: !

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Thanks @Pch !

I think I’m able to share the work-in-progress version on an individual basis, so if you (or anyone else!) wants to play around with my beta and give feedback, DM me your email address.

Got it working so far as a new column format; you type a movie name, and then it juices it up with all the extra metadata that you can then display in adjacent columns. Uses an API from RapidAPI as IMDB doesn’t seem to have a publicly accessible one themselves. It’s free up to 500 requests a month, which I’m hoping will be enough for most people. Looking into other options as well though…

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Here’s a page for it - you can request access there if you want to try it out:

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Integration with your IMDb account’s Watchlist would be super awesome! But not necessary if you simply use the Coda bookmark browser extension.

Title, watch options would be amazing (eg, Amazon Prime), year, runtime, genres, image, director, MPAA rating, IMDb rating, Metascore, maybe top cast

Thanks @David_Knell!

These are great ideas. I don’t think the watchlist would be possible based on how the API I’m relying on works, but the Coda bookmark browser extension is a good way to do it.

I’ve got the rest of your suggestions implemented, with the exception of Watch Options - agree that would be great, but don’t think I can get that info without reaching out to a second API destination (and Coda Packs only let you reach out to one source at this time).

Awesome! I’m so excited to use it! Thanks for making this!

Come to think of it, if someone made Packs for Netflix, Hulu, etc, you could add those as Pack Columns to your Movies Table. If a movie with the same title (or other universal identifier) is on one of those services, it would serve up the link to the movie on that service. Then, if you wanted, you could Concatenate all those column values into one called “Watch Now” and it would list all the places you could watch it!

Bonus: If Google Play Store, Amazon Videos, and other rental services were Packs, you could use a formula to display only one Watch Now link: if you already pay for a service that has the movie (eg, Netflix), it would show you that link; if none of your services has the movie, it displays a link to the rental service that has it at the cheapest price. That would be simple formula logic. Just need all those Packs. :wink:

Not sure if all that would work, but maybe it could!

It’s no possible to connect to IMDb account data via any APIs; IMDb does not expose any APIs to do so…

Yep, I think this is the Coda-ish way to do it!

(Side note - I do with there were ISBNs for movies. But I think the closest we’ve got to a universal identifier is IMDB’s ID)

Hey @Nick_HE and @David_Knell ! So good to see the Coda community involved to make some wished Packs a reality! To contribute to the discussion: I use an app called Infuse (similar to Plex) on Apple ecosystem and they recently migrated to this database: www.themoviedb.org
It’s super rich. It has more consistent data than IMDB and also does have the info of where the movie or series is straming. I don’t know how much this is accesible via API, but Infuse does a great job extracting data from it. Maybe it’s a good API. Just letting you know we have some other data fonts we can look into.

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Interesting! The signup process to get an API key is a bit more involved, so may be annoying to users. However, it may also possible for me to run everything through a single API key, making it even easier than the IMDB approach! Will definitely look into this more…

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I made some small tests and the Pack works surprisingly well! I speak portuguese (brazillian), so I tested to type the movie on portuguese and the table was able to find the current title, even though the title is in english. Very good. But I tried to search for series and didn’t have any luck. Is it implemented or it’s only capable of finding movies for now?

One big difference that the database I suggested has is backgrounds and other types of media that would fit better with Coda. There is no good table layouts that make good use of the movie covers portrait format, but movie backgrounds would fit very well with the new background capabilities of Coda rows detailed view.

I did have troubles with TV Shows too but the Pack was finally able to find it when I used the IMDB ID (from the url of the IMDB page) of the TV Show (I didn’t test on a single episode though) :blush:

Thanks for testing @Guilherme_Salles! Yes, only movies implemented right now. I have it specifically searching for movies for greater accuracy, and plan to implement series in a separate column type/formula (IMDBSeries() vs IMDBMovie()).

Do you agree with this design approach? Because series have such different related data compared to a movie, I thought it made sense to have its own set of data points / columns etc. How would you want series to work? Would a whole series get a row in coda, or would you want to search for a specific episode to put in a row?

I noticed those backgrounds in the API you mentioned! Agree they would be a great fit for most of coda’s layouts. There are a couple things the current API is better for, but I’m honestly leaning toward TMDB right now - it has a lot going for it.

I suppose I should rename the pack in that case :sweat_smile:

“Movies for Coda?”

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I am really happy you are interested in my suggestion! I think it should be called Movie Dictionary :crazy_face: just kidding

About the tv shows implementation. I don’t know what are the possibilities of what you have in hands, but I do think it should be a different column type like you mentioned.

With that, you could create a column “season” where we could select the one we are looking for and, after selecting the season, we could open the episodes column that is formula filtered based on the season selected.

I’ve got an IMDB pack I need to make public as soon as I get the auth sorted out. It works for search and returns details about Movies, Series and People. It wraps the imdbapi.com API, which allows 100 searches per day with the free token. When I make this shareable I’ll be sure to link it back here.

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OK, I’ve overhauled the pack to use auth correctly instead of hard-coding the api key. My next question is, do people have access to the history of the code in the pack? Can someone rooting around in there go back to a version with my API key hard-coded?

I am eager to share this! :slight_smile: