Querying IMDB for movie information

I’m a big movie fan and own a lot of movies. To keep track of them all I manage a small access database file. This is ok but some more details on the movie would be great. So if I want to find some more information on a specific movie, I visis www.imdb.com , which probably is one the best knows movie sites out there.

The problem with IMDB however is that there is no API or webservice that you can talk too. Like Amazon.com for example does have, http://aws.amazon.com/. So I opened google and started looking for some way of querying IMDB. If you google you get a lot of results of people who have created something.

There was one interesting open source project which caught my eye and this is, Imdb services on codeplex.

I though wow this looks good, let’s take a look at the code.

In the vb.net project you’ll see a class that screen scrapes the IMDB result and using regular expressions selects the different parts of data and places it in different classes. A really clever way of getting data from somewhere. The problem I see here though is that sites like IMDB tend to do updates to there HTML code. When something like that would happen, this project will throw errors. But for now, really nice project and if you want to create a slick winforms application to browse through your movies, you can use this project to get some more details.

For the long run, please IMDB, put some effort in creating a webservice that we can use to query and retrieve movie information. You would make a lot of people very happy I think.

 

Sven