Active4 years, 6 months ago
IMDB provides plain text files user's can download and use which can be found here: IMDB Plain Text Files which is great but I don't see the ID used for each movie in any of the files.
Given IMDB specifically says not to use scrapers, data gatherers etc in their Conditions of Use how would one obtain the title ID http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1133985/ for each movie if they aren't included in any of the plain text files.
I've noticed there are some API's others have built that do include this ID so I'm wondering how did they manage to do that.
The Movie Database (TMDb). You can download the entire database of imdb. If the licenses around the IMDb data dump work for you. Software Downloads: Imdb Database Dump. Related: Imdb Database. Flickz 2.7.0.7 It can automatically import movie details and cover images from the IMDB database.
- Software Downloads: Imdb Database Dump. Related: Imdb Database. Flickz 2.7.0.7 It can automatically import movie details and cover images from the IMDB database.
- Subsets of IMDb data are available for access to customers for personal and non-commercial use. You can hold local copies of this data. Download Audio Books.
- Where to get IMDb datasets. There're multiple ways to get small pieces of its database: Download a subset of data from dump.
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3 Answers
You can use IMDB API located at
You can search for movie names like this -
You can get the 'ID' (tt1411697) from this JSON response.
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Lenin Raj RajasekaranDatabase Dump File
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As mentioned, IMDB does not have a web service. imdbapi works by screen scraping. The flat files available for download are a legacy from IMDB's pre-Amazon days, and the information there is incomplete. (You could not build your own IMDB with just the files that are available)
However, Rotten Tomatoes does have a nice web interface that returns, among other things, the imdb id of the films - in the alternate_ids section. So, you could use the Rotten Tomatoes API to obtain the imdb id without screen scraping imdb directly.
Rotten Tomatoes' database is less extensive than IMDB's, but it does a pretty good job with modern (1995+) US releases.
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You can try TMDb. You can check the documentation here - http://docs.themoviedb.apiary.io/. You can use append_to_response and can get the IMDB id along with other details. There is an alternate solution that I know of. The solution is in PHP. Here is the link - http://blogs.niteshapte.com/2013-07-01-how-to-fetch-movie-identifier-id-from-imdb-using-php.htm. You might need to tweak it as per your requirement.
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Download Imdb Database
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The internet movie database, imdb.com, is a website devoted to collecting movie data supplied by studios and fan. It claims to be the biggest movie database on the web and is run by amazon. More about information imdb.com can be found online, including information about the data collection process.
IMDB makes their raw data available. Unfortunately, the data is divided into many text files and the format of each file differs slightly. To create one data file containing all the desired information these ruby scripts extract the relevant information and store in a database. Finally, this data is exported to csv to make it easier to import into data analysis packages.
The following text files were downloaded and used:
International Movie Database Imdb
- business.list. Total budget
- genres.list. Genres that a movie belongs to (eg. comedy and action)
- movies.list. Master list of all movie titles with year of production.
- mpaa-ratings-reasons.list. MPAA ratings.
- ratings.list. IMDB fan ratings.
- running-times.list. Movie length in minutes.
Movies were selected for inclusion if they had a known length and had been rated by at least one IMDB user. The final output contains the following fields:
![Download Imdb Database Dump Download Imdb Database Dump](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126568247/744369531.png)
- title. Title of the movie.
- year. Year of release.
- budget. Total budget (if known) in US dollars
- length. Length in minutes.
- rating. Average IMDB user rating.
- votes. Number of IMDB users who rated this movie.
- r1-10. Distribution of votes for each rating, to mid point of nearest decile: 0 = no votes, 4.5 = 1-9$%$ votes, 14.5 = 11-19$%$ of votes, etc. Due to rounding errors these may not sum to 100.
- mpaa. MPAA rating.
- action, animation, comedy, drama, documentary, romance, short. Binary variables representing if movie was classified as belonging to that genre.