List of all movie title, actors, directors, writers on Imdb

Question

I am working on a web app which lets users tell their favourite movies, directors, movie- writers, and actors. For this I want to provide them a dropdown list or auto complete for each of them so that they can just pick their choices.

For this: I need a list of all movie titles, actors, directors, writers present on Imdb.

I checked Imdbpy and it does not seem to provide methods to get this data.

Would using imdbpy2sql.py to create a database and using sql to query the db, provide the required data? Is there any other way to do this?

Thanks!

Surprise

Will this be helpful to you? Similar question has been posted in WebApps stack site – Transude

@Transude I know of services which give imdb details per movie...they let you retrieve details when you give them movie title or imdb id ...but what I need is a list of all movies on imdb and similarly actors, director and writers – Surprise

Answer 1

Using imdbpy2sql.py to create a database and using SQL to query the db, will provide you the required data.

You can also try using Java Movie Database or imdbdumpimport to read in the text files to SQL.

The last option to do this is parsing the plain text files provided by IMDb yourself.

Caress

got the data through imdbpy2sql.py + sql queries. – Surprise

Answer 2

I think your best option is to parse the plain text files distributed here: imdb interfaces. You probably just need the 'movies', 'actors', 'actresses' and 'director' file; they are quite easy to parse.

Histone

Were English versions of those databases up at this time? I only see two French and Dutch.. Is this on purpose? – Gaskins

@AndrewTFinnell: which files are you using? ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/misc/movies/database contains all the English titles, plus a lot of AKAs in other languages. – Histone