[SMALL PROJECT] Local movie catalog using IMDB

Permission granted 😀 [...on the side note; no permission is needed to start projects here 😁 ]. I personally find this project useful. Very good small CE Labs project to begin with. 😀

Thanks Biggie 😀

Ok here is a raw break down of the Project

Phase 1:

1. Get user input for movies location, check folder for access and existence, get directory structure and file names, store these in a 'raw_movies.txt' file. (This file will be used to get names of movies and process them further.)

2. Get one name of a movie/folder etc. Process it to extract proper movie name that would be used to search IMDB. (This step can be a bit difficult, and interesting)

3. Post name of movie on IMDB database, get partial or full information about the movie.

4. Store information on a local database.

Thats all we will look at for now. This will be Phase 1 of the project. Pour in your thoughts.

I want to take their names and go online to IMDB and get vital statistics and store them on a local database to access later.

I got an idea what you actually want?? But i am getting confused How can these vital statistics be helpful?

I think this project is very interesting.
And it will be personally very useful to me too.. For I have more than 200 titles in my hard drive.

I think, in the second step, human intervention is required.
The movie files can be named haphazardly. The filename of a movie can bear no resemblance to the name of the movie.
So, the first thing would be to properly name the files with the correct movie names.

Now, we can say that the original haphazard filename itself can be used to search IMDB, but that would entail more difficulties later.
So, I would say that we must first ensure the movies are aptly named. This is a manual effort and no engineering is involved,
but still, I would say this is an important preparation step.

Next is reading these filenames from a program and getting them written into a text file. I dont know how to do it, but I guess it shouldn't be too difficult.
Then we have to read the movie names one by one from the text file. This can be done easily in any language.

After getting the movie name, we have to connect to the IMDB website and give the movie name as the search query.
I have no idea how this can be done. But I'm sure even this will be easy to do.

The difficult part comes after we have entered the search string and given the search. We have to interpret the resultset correctly. That will be difficult, I guess.

Once we have interpreted the result and queried the required info from the database, storing it in a local DB in the system wouldn't be an issue at all.

That's all for now.

Excellent @silver!

silverscorpion

I think, in the second step, human intervention is required.
The movie files can be named haphazardly. The filename of a movie can bear no resemblance to the name of the movie.
So, the first thing would be to properly name the files with the correct movie names.

This is exactly what I came across, and you know what, in the past few years I am losing my trust in the future of AI. Not everything, but some parts of it. Dont like the thinking the one day machines will replace humans. Anyway, I digress, its 3am over here.

So, as I was saying you are absolutely right, we need human-in-the-loop. This is where it gets interesting.

Here is one way:

0. We have raw_movies.txt file from the hard drive.

1. Take one movie name "The.Lost.Souls.of.Engineering [2022] - DvdBackup blah"

2. [IMPORTANT] Place this name to the user with a text cursor, where they can edit the file name on the fly and press <ENTER>.

3. Store it in a new file clean_movies.txt

What do you think? This step must be efficient and fast. I think Human-in-the-loop is a very delicate part of UI. It should not irritate ppl or they will never use the product.

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Important foot note:

I would like to build this project in Python. 3 reasons why:

1. Its a really really good language for scripting (even otherwise its very handy)

2. It would be an opportunity for CE members to learn python via a live project.

3. I have working knowledge of Python and can help others to learn it really fast.

Hey Ash (been so long!),

Nice info. But the thing is, since the database would be updated once a while and the Python package I have used, uses their HTTP requests, I think there wouldn't be a problem. Since there hasn't been a problem for the package developer (IMDBpy) so why for us? I know accessing a webpage using a script is kind of 'rude', but thats in extreme cases. I will have to read about it more.

And as for:

I will still consciously feel this encourages (by way of convenience) having a collection of movies obtained shadily.

😛

How would a project to get information from IMDB (by a way of convenience) 'encourage' me to obtain movies shadily? IMDB is just a database.

I suppose looking through the source code of IMDBpy would be a good start then 😉

How would a project to get information from IMDB (by a way of convenience) 'encourage' me to obtain movies shadily? IMDB is just a database.

I guess we can debate this somewhere else instead 😛

Fine,
Step # 1: I will have some 'x' directory or drive locations + sorting/search[not clear - Please make it clear.] criteria type say 'abc' as input
Step # 2: For each 'x' location, I will have 'y' files/directories
Step # 3: For each 'y'
Case 1: If File, Go to Step # 4
Case 2: If directory, repeat step 3 again.
Step # 4:
a) Send file-name and hit IMDB/rottentomatoes.com/JAVA IMDB, fetch "vital" details [Please make clear about what all will be "vital"]
b) Make connection to our movie local Database and save the "vital" details fetched in Step # 4a)
Step #5: Enter the input sorting/search[not clear - Please make it clear.] criteria type say 'abc' , hit the database with search query and get the sorted results.

Correct me if wrong!

Thanks,
-Sookie

Excellent analysis sookie. I will make it clearer or expand on it.

Step #1:

'x' is location of files ( directory or file(s) ) manually entered by the user where movies are kept. The software will not look for files or directory on it's own.

Step #2:

Look for files within the directory

Step #3:

If directory goto #2, if file goto #4.

Step #4:

Is the file a .avi, .mov, .mpeg, .mpg, .mkv etc?
Store the name and location of the movie in a temporary database (see Step #5).

Step #6:

Goto IMDB/Rottontomatoes and get details for each Actual_Movie_Name:

Movie Name (done)
Release date
IMDB Movie Poster or RT Poster .jpg
IMDB Rating
RT Rating
Plot Summery (60 chars I think)
Directed by
Written by
Starring (First billed actors only, 4 or maybe 5 names)
Theme group (Horror, Romance, Drama, etc)
IMDB Link
RT Link

Step #7:

Store in database. Which of course can be sorted by any of the above fields. So if one night I want to watch a 60's Horror movie from my collection, I just refer to my dB and sort it and find the folder it is in.


Step #5:

This is an important step. Since it is very difficult to extract exact movie name from the file name through a the software.

For example I have some movies with the format "Watchmen (2009) DVDRip-Personal" and another "bla.xfm" .

So an intermediate database will be created first.

File_Name, Location_PC, Actual_Movie_Name, Select

After the database has been populated with file names. The user can select which fields he wants to Edit or remove from the list. For example it will detect all the episodes of a series as individual file names:

File_Name          Location_PC          Actual_Movie_Name          Select

bla.xfm.avi          C:\Movies\Schoolastic\
Watchmen (2009) DVDRip-Personal.avi          C:\Movies\Watchmen
House s01e01.avi          C:\Movies\House s01\
House s01e03.avi          C:\Movies\House s01\
House s01e04.avi          C:\Movies\House s01\
House s01e05.avi          C:\Movies\House s01\
House s01e06.avi          C:\Movies\House s01\
House s01e07.avi          C:\Movies\House s01\
House s01e08.avi          C:\Movies\House s01\

WILL BE EDITED BY THE USER INTO:

File_Name          Location_PC          Actual_Movie_Name          Select

bla.xfm.avi          C:\Movies\Schoolastic\          Schoolastic         1
Watchmen (2009) DVDRip-Personal.avi          C:\Movies\Watchmen          Watchmen          1
House s01e01.avi          C:\Movies\House s01\          House M.D.          1    

NOTE: Another small problem that can crop up is movies with the same name. Even then there would be a need for user interaction. But we will deal with that at the right time.

File and Folder Reading Classes

I am reusing a class to read files and folders from a given location.

In the next section they will be edited to list Folders and only Movie Files.

FileListing.java

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;

/**
* Recursive file listing under a specified directory.
*  
* @author javapractices.com
* @author Alex Wong
* @author Anon
*/
public final class FileListing {

  /**
  * Recursively walk a directory tree and return a List of all
  * Files found; the List is sorted using File.compareTo().
  *
  * @param aStartingDir is a valid directory, which can be read.
  */
  
   static public List<File> getSpecListing(
    File aStartingDir
  ) throws FileNotFoundException {
    validateDirectory(aStartingDir);
    List<File> result = getFileListingNoSort(aStartingDir);
    //Collections.sort(result);
    return result;
  }

  // PRIVATE //
  static public List<File> getFileListingNoSort(
    File aStartingDir
  ) throws FileNotFoundException {
    List<File> result = new ArrayList<File>();	
    File[] filesAndDirs = aStartingDir.listFiles();
    List<File> filesDirs = Arrays.asList(filesAndDirs);
    for(File file : filesDirs) {
      result.add(file); //always add, even if directory
      if ( ! file.isFile() ) {
        //must be a directory
        //recursive call! and Store Dir in new list, append to results
        List<File> deeperList = getFileListingNoSort(file);
        result.addAll(deeperList);
      }
    }
    return result;
  }

  /**
  * Directory is valid if it exists, does not represent a file, and can be read.
  */

  static private void validateDirectory (
    File aDirectory
  ) throws FileNotFoundException {
    if (aDirectory == null) {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException("Directory should not be null.");
    }
    if (!aDirectory.exists()) {
      throw new FileNotFoundException("Directory does not exist: " + aDirectory);
    }
    if (!aDirectory.isDirectory()) {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException("Is not a directory: " + aDirectory);
    }
    if (!aDirectory.canRead()) {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException("Directory cannot be read: " + aDirectory);
    }
  }
} 

The usage of this class is in ExtractMovieName.java

import com.moviedb.FileListing;
import java.lang.String;
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;

public class ExtractMovieName {

	/**
	 * This Class is used to get movie names from folders and store them in a "database". 
	 * @param args; not used
	 * @throws FileNotFoundException 
	 */

	public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
		File filedir = new File("D:\\Movies\\");
		
                List<File> files = FileListing.getSpecListing(filedir);
		for(File file : files ){
		      System.out.println(file);
		    }
	    }
}

Hey awesome work man,

I am not sure if anyone has tried it or not yet but I faced the problem with manifest file[or may be the way jar file is created was wrong]. I got following error message

Failed to load Main-Class manifest attribute from
ExtractMovieName.jar

I am not sure if anyone also faced the same problem or not.

How I made it working for me: I have observed that manifest.mf the one inside "com.moviedb" folder need to be in META-INF folder and the Main-Class manifest attribute should include the package name also, then only it worked for me. Manifest.mf file inside "META-INF" folder should be like below

Manifest-Version: 0.1
Created-By: Varun Dhanwantri
Name: java/MovieDB/
Implementation-Title: com.moviedb
Implementation-Version: build57
Implementation-Vendor: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Main-Class: com.moviedb.ExtractMovieName

and I deleted the manifest.mf from com.moviedb folder.

Thanks sookie for the feedback. So the movie listing has worked but my packaging was wrong. Ok, I will change it and update it as soon as I can. If anyone is interested to handle the project collaboratively I will add them as admins to the project page.

sookie

Hey awesome work man,

I am not sure if anyone has tried it or not yet but I faced the problem with manifest file[or may be the way jar file is created was wrong]. I got following error message
I am not sure if anyone also faced the same problem or not.

How I made it working for me: I have observed that manifest.mf the one inside "com.moviedb" folder need to be in META-INF folder and the Main-Class manifest attribute should include the package name also, then only it worked for me. Manifest.mf file inside "META-INF" folder should be like below

and I deleted the manifest.mf from com.moviedb folder.

I have added modifications as described by you in this post ,but it is still now working again giving me same error ,can you please check ?why it is not working?

I think when i am trying to create a new jar file ,at that time it is ignoring manifest.mf file ,may be this is the reason

F:\Programs\IMDB\com\moviedb>jar cvf ExtractMovieName.jar *
added manifest
adding: com/(in = 0) (out= 0)(stored 0%)
adding: com/moviedb/(in = 0) (out= 0)(stored 0%)
adding: com/moviedb/ExtractMovieName.class(in = 4639) (out= 2427)(deflated 47%)
adding: com/moviedb/FileListing.class(in = 2813) (out= 1509)(deflated 46%)
ignoring entry META-INF/
ignoring entry META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

F:\Programs\IMDB\com\moviedb>jar xvf ExtractMovieName.jar
  created: META-INF/
 inflated: META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
  created: com/
  created: com/moviedb/
 inflated: com/moviedb/ExtractMovieName.class
 inflated: com/moviedb/FileListing.class

xheavenlyx

Thanks sookie for the feedback. So the movie listing has worked but my packaging was wrong. Ok, I will change it and update it as soon as I can. If anyone is interested to handle the project collaboratively I will add them as admins to the project page.

You can add me.