The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
API support for adding movies to the database?
posted by melstavSTAFFMOD on July 9, 2016 at 12:38 PM
As mentioned in a previous thread, I have metadata for at least a couple dozen DVDs which used to be in the database, but were (imho, wrongly) deleted when someone reported one of them as being a "TV episode". This was before the "Video" flag was added to the interface. I would like to resubmit them, and while I'm at it, I'd like to add entries for the other DVDs in my collection that are missing from the database.
I started the process using the website interface, and came to the conclusion that trying to use it for bulk entry will get really annoying. I was hoping that there'd be API support for creating new movie entries, but I studied the API documentation, and it looks like the web form is the only supported method is the web form. Is that the case, or is there an API call that I'm missing or other easily scriptable method?
Also, when the original entries were deleted from the database, only the entries in the database table were removed. The image URLs are all on cf2.imgobject.com, which redirect to valid entries on http://image.tmdb.org/. For example, http://cf2.imgobject.com/t/p/w185/saGEk5yiOZC89Q6WEQx8fIiFZ3J.jpg is the thumbnail I have for the entry I just added. As I'm attempting to restore the entries in the database, is there a way for me to reconnect the images you already have to the newly added entries?
Reply by Travis Bell
on July 12, 2016 at 9:49 AM
Hi melstav,
We do not support submitting any data via the API at this time. The website is the only way.
You can grab the "original" version of an image by changing the 'w185' part of the image path to 'original', like so:
http://cf2.imgobject.com/t/p/original/saGEk5yiOZC89Q6WEQx8fIiFZ3J.jpg
On a complete side note, simply because I am curious, imgobject.com hasn't been used as our image domain since May of 2014, where are you getting that address from?
Cheers.
Reply by melstav
on July 13, 2016 at 11:04 PM
Thanks for that, Travis.
I looked, briefly, at the HTML/JavaScript source for the "add new movie" and the various edit/update pages, and I'm pretty sure I can script something relatively easily using perl's LWP::UserAgent, but the idea of trying to develop an update tool like that against the production environment does't exactly give me warm fuzzy feelings. Especially since it doesn't appear that I can delete any crap records I might create on my own. It looks like I have to flag them and request that someone else delete them for me. I'll have to think about that. I may just stick with the safe path of actually using the web interface, however tedious it may be.
As for where I got the URL from.... Like I said, I have a bunch of data that used to be in TMDB, but has since been deleted. Based on https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5128ba2319c2951d66134ec4 I'm guessing that the data for all of the Signing Time DVDs were expunged somewhere around February 2013. I'm not sure when I got my first (of four currently in use) WDTV Live media player. Sometime in 2010-2011, maybe? The Signing Time disks would have been among the first ones in my collection to get ripped and stored on my media server, so the boxes would have pulled the data shortly after that.
Reply by Travis Bell
on July 15, 2016 at 10:50 AM
Re: building something that can post to the same endpoints as the website, I think it's been done before. The main thing I want to caution is that the forms can change at any given time so you would want to ensure to build a check around that. These forms are only designed to serve the website.
Gotcha! So yes, it was from some older devices. I just wanted to makes sure it wasn't something newer than that.
Thanks.
Reply by James Gardiner
on December 6, 2017 at 5:28 PM
So Travis, Your not against writing code to emulate website updates for pushing pragmatically into the database? Just don't be surprised if the Web based update API changes without any warning. Do at own risk. Be ready to update to match.
Reply by Travis Bell
on December 18, 2017 at 12:09 PM
James, essentially, yes. I can't really stop anyone from doing it.