IMDb API Research - KristinJJ/MovieMeetUp GitHub Wiki

IMDb API Research

rapidapi.com has a link talking about how to implement their imdb API here: How to use the IMDb API

  • Requires creating an account (but their is a free tier - limit of 1000 requests/day)
  • Once you create an account, an API Key is provided
  • For Node.js, may require an npm install of a 3rd party request library, Unirest. However there does appear to be a HTTP native option as well (see here)
  • IMDb has the ability to search for trailers, which may be an interesting option to explore: IMDb-API.com

What may be of more interest is rapidapi's API for Entertainment Data Hub: "The API provides a powerful search of movies, games and TV series using multiple filters including availability on streaming services, year of release, ratings and more. Metadata and a poster for each game or movie title is returned as well as deep information about TV series and their seasons and episodes. There is also a Data Match Endpoint to input your own title details and match them to IVA’s professionally curated data set as well as an ID Match Endpoint to get IVA data based on 3rd party IDs such as IMDb, TMDb, etc."

Limits of the Two APIs

  • There doesn't seem to be an option for either API above to just search for a list of movies. Both seem to want the user to get details for a specific movie or search for a particular movie.
  • Additional testing with Endpoints explorer needs to be done, but it they both seem more limiting that we were hoping for.
  • A couple other options didn't seem too much better:

Code Implementation

  • Code snippets from Endpoint experiements are available in a variety of code languages, but I ran into Typescript issues with node.js and JavaScript variants.
  • (7/7/21) Translating the api return to an indexable array for targeting of specific attributes is currently proving elusive.

API Update

  • proceeding with a different api, found by Kristin: https://imdb-api.com/
    • implementing API calls is cleaner, no additional header information required
    • movie details information is more inclusive of the elements we are desiring