The Movie Database Support

The Daily ID Exports documentation says

All of the exported files are available for download from http://files.tmdb.org. ... There is currently no authentication on these files since they are not very useful unless you're a user of our service.

However, attempting to fetch the set of IDs at https://files.tmdb.org/movie_ids_05_20_2024.json.gz gets an "Access Denied" error message.

(Bonus question: does "adult" in the context of the API mean "exclude content created for children" or "include content for which access by children is restricted"?)

8 replies (on page 1 of 1)

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Ah, I see. There's a mistake in the example link. If you click on that link and then edit it to replace the older date with today's date, you should get a 404 error, because the markup for that link leaves out the /p/exports portion. Restoring the missing portion of the path successfully retrieves the list. Probably a good idea to fix that markup in the documentation (and return a 404 instead of a success error code for resources which can't be found). Even better, fix the markup and generate the example dynamically so that the example URL doesn't represent a file which is old enough to have been deleted.

I'd still be interested in finding out how TMDB is using "adult" on this page when it says "we are now publishing the adult data set." It would be useful to be able to filter out movies and shows made exclusively for children, but since that language is ambiguous, I can't tell by reading this documentation that this is what is meant. I suppose I could always download one of the sets and see if it contains IDs for mainstream content created for adults. Still, I'm a big fan of unambiguous documentation. Why make the reader guess when you can just say exactly what you mean? 😉

Hi @bkline,

From a data point of view, "adult" on TMDB refers to pornography. This term is used all throughout TMDB to indicate as such.

Thanks, Travis. Is there a bug-tracking system where I should report the incorrect link in the documentation described above?

No problem.

I have fixed the link already.

Super! Thanks.

Actually, I see you decided not to generate the link dynamically, but stick with a hard-coded date. I can understand why you'd want to do that (perhaps you have no functionality for generating anything on the documentation pages dynamically). Still, you'll probably want the date in the displayed text to match the new hard-coded date ("May 15, 2024" instead of "May 15, 2023").

Also, I'm a little surprised that a site which (with good justification) prides itself on its international focus would choose a US-centric date format for the file-naming convention used for the data sets instead of using the unambiguous ISO order for the date components. 🤔

The docs are not dynamic, so whenever an update happens it has to be done by hand. On that note, files expire and are only available for 90 days.

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