[iamGOTI]

Hi can you please add an information provider for IMDB, for TV Shows & Movies? It has more information in my opinion and it's more popular, so I don't see why it isn't a feature. THank you in advance.

[jjd-uk]

It is also extremely expensive if you want to use their API

[pkscout]

I feel like "extremely expensive" might not properly capture the cost.  '-)  It's $150K (US) a year PLUS bandwidth usage.

Developing the scraper would be the easy part.  Finding someone to give Kodi a quarter of a million dollars a year would be the hard part.

[jbinkley60]

I feel like "extremely expensive" might not properly capture the cost.  '-)  It's $150K (US) a year PLUS bandwidth usage.

Developing the scraper would be the easy part.  Finding someone to give Kodi a quarter of a million dollars a year would be the hard part.

Individuals can get 5,000 API requests a day for $11.24 a month.  I bought one for a year for my own use.


Jeff

[jjd-uk]

That's the cost of a streaming service 😲 A rip off IMHO

[pkscout]

I feel like "extremely expensive" might not properly capture the cost.  '-)  It's $150K (US) a year PLUS bandwidth usage.

Developing the scraper would be the easy part.  Finding someone to give Kodi a quarter of a million dollars a year would be the hard part.

Individuals can get 5,000 API requests a day for $11.24 a month.  I bought one for a year for my own use.


Jeff

That's not the official IMDB API.  That's some random third party in France, and it isn't clear how they're getting access to the IMDB information.  There is nothing on their site about any agreement with IMDB to resell IMDB's information, so I'm a little leery of it.

I guess if someone really wanted to, they could build a scraper that required someone to buy an API key from this place, although the idea of asking someone to pay $144 a year just to be able to use IMDB as a scraper source seems a little strange.  I doubt Team Kodi would do that as an official project.  Between the officially supported TMDb scrapers, there are free scrapers available for TVDB (movies and TV shows) as well as TVMaze (TV shows only).

[scott967]

I suppose you could write an actual scraper rather than accessing the api, but I'm guessing IMDB employs various anti-scraper blocks/blacklists.

scott s.
.

[jbinkley60]

That's not the official IMDB API.  That's some random third party in France, and it isn't clear how they're getting access to the IMDB information.  There is nothing on their site about any agreement with IMDB to resell IMDB's information, so I'm a little leery of it.

I guess if someone really wanted to, they could build a scraper that required someone to buy an API key from this place, although the idea of asking someone to pay $144 a year just to be able to use IMDB as a scraper source seems a little strange.  I doubt Team Kodi would do that as an official project.  Between the officially supported TMDb scrapers, there are free scrapers available for TVDB (movies and TV shows) as well as TVMaze (TV shows only).

Good callout.  I actually missed that this isn't officially with IMDB.  It's a web services front end.  I do have to believe they have some arrangement with IMDB or they would have been shutdown by now.  The API is hosted in the US via Cloudflare.  I did write an artwork scraper for actors / actresses that isn't on other metadata sites.   I'll decide after the year is up whether I keep the service.


Jeff