The Movie Database Support

I was wondering if it's possible to get a random movie from a category ?

I'm doing a mobile app where you can like or dislike a movie that appears randomly after the user chooses a category,

For example :

  • User chooses "Action"
  • User presses "Start"
  • A poster of a random action movie appears,

For action, for example (with category number 28) : I was thinking to use:

https://api.themoviedb.org/3/discover/movie?api_key=<key>&language=fr-FR&include_adult=false&with_genres=28&page=<randomNumber>

and generate a random number to put after "page=" and then picking a film among the ones returned ?...

Thanks,

5 replies (on page 1 of 1)

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You can't get a random movie directly from TMDB API, so your approach is correct thumbsup. I would only add "&sort_by=popularity.desc" to sort the results by popularity to get more relevant results and then choose randomly from let's say first 1000 records.

@talestalker said:

You can't get a random movie directly from TMDB API, so your approach is correct thumbsup. I would only add "&sort_by=popularity.desc" to sort the results by popularity to get more relevant results and then choose randomly from let's say first 1000 records.

how do you get the first 1000 records in the url ?

The results are paginated by 20 and you can access any page using "&page=" parameter, so you should generate a random number from 1-1000 then get the corresponding page (page = random_number DIV 20) and finally get the corresponding result from the downloaded page (item = random_number MOD 20).

Thank you for the answer bro

@talestalker said:

The results are paginated by 20 and you can access any page using "&page=" parameter, so you should generate a random number from 1-1000 then get the corresponding page (page = random_number DIV 20) and finally get the corresponding result from the downloaded page (item = random_number MOD 20).

thank you talestaker, this means a lot to me

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