The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
TV Episodes: Get External IDs Returns ID for some episodes and not others.
posted by capekinoSTAFFMOD on November 28, 2020 at 11:42 AM
I was trying to convert a TMDb id, season, and episode to an IMDb id for the show Archer. Unfortunately, for season 9, I was only able to get an IMDb id for episode 1 and none of the other episodes returned an imdb id.
For episode 1 of season 9:
{
"id": 1445206,
"imdb_id": "tt5825434",
"freebase_mid": null,
"freebase_id": null,
"tvdb_id": 6579347,
"tvrage_id": null
}
For the rest of the episodes in the season:
{
"id": 1481461,
"imdb_id": null,
"freebase_mid": null,
"freebase_id": null,
"tvdb_id": null,
"tvrage_id": null
}
Reply by Travis Bell
on November 28, 2020 at 12:04 PM
Hi @capekino, we don't have IMDb ID's added for those episodes:
Reply by capekino
on November 28, 2020 at 12:30 PM
I see, thank you for responding. Is there any way to automatically populate these ids if they are missing? Going to IMDb over and over again seems very tedious.
Reply by Travis Bell
on November 28, 2020 at 12:37 PM
No problem!
Unfortunately there is not. We do not have any kind of automated importing for any data in TMDb. Our data is 100% user contributed.
Reply by capekino
on November 28, 2020 at 12:41 PM
Hmmm, I have some experience with Selenium datascraping in Python. Would writing a script to automatically fetch IDs from IMDb urls and populating blank IDs for a season be a violation of ToS? I could whip something up and make it open source if it doesn't break any rules.
Reply by Travis Bell
on December 2, 2020 at 12:07 PM
It's not inherently against our terms, but that might not be true for other sites. I can't speak to that.
I would suggest you proceed with caution and I would prefer to not see something like this get open sourced simply because we can't have a bunch of users running a bunch of scripts that may or may not always be working properly. This is of course the problem with any data scraping--what's valid today might not be valid tomorrow.