Actor Photos & Details

[michae1a1ee]

A feature request I'd like to see would be to expand on the details we get when we look at the Cast of a movie. It would be nice if CMC pulled the data and photo of each actor in the Cast list from IMDB so we could read a little about a person right from CMC, as well as also see their movie Discography. Windows Media Center had a decent implementation of doing this; it would be nice to see the same or improved upon interface in CMC.

[Pauven]

Yes, I agree this would be nice.

While this data already exists inside My Movies, Binnerup never exposed it via the API. I asked him years ago to expose this functionality. More recently, Binnerup has stated that the API is no longer being worked on, so it looks like this will not happen. While I would typically recommend raising this issue with Binnerup, based upon their recent comments this seems like a waste of time anymore.

One thing I never figured out is how WMC accessed this data. It always seemed like WMC used the MM API, yet actor/crew data is simply not exposed in the API, so they must have had an alternate way of retrieving this data. I'm guessing it was direct database access, or possibly some type of hidden/private data portal. Binnerup has certainly gone out of their way to lock down their DB.

While this metadata does exist elsewhere, generally it is not free. And considering that I couldn't get enough people to pay for CMC, and since it is free now, there are zero funds for me to pay for external data sources.

I will not break the law or website terms of service to scrape data, so only legitimate sources of metadata will be considered. If you can identify a free source of this data, I would definitely be interested. Notably, this situation may have improved since I last looked at it several years ago. Typically, non-free/commercial apps are required to pay for metadata access, and CMC was definitely a commercial app back when I charged a licensing fee. Now that CMC is 100% free, some of these metadata sources may actually be free now (many metadata sources have a policy of paid-apps must pay, but free apps get a free ride), so it's not as impossible as when I last looked at this.

[michae1a1ee]

I honestly wasn't thinking or suggesting that the data should be stolen. In reading your message again I'm guessing that comment was directed at the idea of taking the data from MyMovies?? Regardless, when I wrote my message I was totally thinking about IMDB, not MM. I figured the IMDB data must be available for people to use, otherwise I don't think it would be so blatantly used as a data source in Collection Management, like it very obviously is, IMDB logo and all! LOL

For CMC, if we can't get at our populated Actor data from MM/CM, I was thinking it could be directly pulled from IMDB. I did a little research and while it's hard for anyone to say that MM isn't a "commercial" venture given that it is a charged-for piece of software, it would seem to me that CMC IS a "non-commercial" piece of software now that it's free. It would therefore be able to make use of at least some IMDB data from what I can tell from the below linked article:

Can I use IMDb data in my software?
https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/gene ... rt_nav_18#

[Pauven]

Keeping in mind that what I write here may be read by anyone, and over time may be viewed hundreds or thousands of times, I wanted to be clear that I would only use ethical metadata sources. My comments regarding scraping weren't particularly aimed at you, but rather my attempt to be upfront about what I am and am not willing to do, regardless of whom may be reading my words.

If anything, I think the My Movies data should just about be fair game. After all, it's already on my PC, and available for my use, and they already have an API that I paid to access this data in the manner of my choosing. It seems like more of an oversight or simple limitation that the actor/crew data is not exposed via the API. However, Binnerup has locked this data down behind security features and has not provided API access, so that definitely brings into question what is and is not acceptable use. I've honestly been contemplating this for years, and I've yet to determine an answer, though the fact that this is public data that lives on my PC has certainly held my attention.

IMDB definitely has limits on the use of their data. Considering my 2k+ movie collection has almost 100-thousand actors alone, plus tens of thousands more crew, IMDB might take issue with me downloading all this data, even for personal use. Multiply that by all the CMC users, and we're talking about tens-of millions if not more data records being downloaded.

Typically, metadata sources want you to set up a caching solution, i.e. everyone's CMC would talk to my server to retrieve cached actor/crew data, and my server would talk to IMDB to fill in the gaps when a user needs data not already on my server. The problem here is that IMDB explicitly prohibits this behavior.

So chances are, IMDB would not approve of CMC using their data on such a large scale, not individual installs and certainly not via a centralized server. Considering that CMC is in a very small group of apps (free home cinema apps that can consume large volumes of actor/crew metadata), this is likely a very rare problem that IMDB has little interest in entertaining.

While IMDB may be the premiere source of movie data that most people would remember, there's actually quite a few alternative sources that might be a better fit. I did in-depth research about 5 years ago, but I don't remember much about it anymore. Perhaps I can find my notes. I have a feeling that one of these data sources was nearly perfect, except for the licensing fee since I was charging for CMC.

[Pauven]

I did find my notes, and TheMovieDB.org was my leading candidate for metadata. Our fellow CMC user Jamie did most of the research for me, and he found this gem.

They do have an API, and here are their API Terms of Use.

I'm not sure if that's a home-run, though, since one of their restrictions prohibits caching data for longer than 6 months, and additionally they prohibit applications that use excessive amounts of bandwidth. So if I try to minimize bandwidth via caching, I'm violating their terms of use, and without caching then CMC would likely use excessive amounts of bandwidth if I simply downloaded every person in my collection.

One possibility is to only retrieve data in real-time, on an as-needed basis. So you're browsing the Actor/Crew data, and select a person, then the data for just that 1 person is retrieved for your own personal use. I'm not sure how fast that would be, but the CMC user base is small enough that TMDB would be unlikely to complain about used bandwidth.

[Pauven]

I've posted a question on TMDB's support forum, asking if and how I could use their People data in CMC:

https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/663166e61283e9012a0bcef9

[michae1a1ee]

I admit, I didn't even remember that themoviedb.org was a thing before you posted it.
I downloaded their mobile app and....well, it's a far cry from IMDB. It's buggy, occasionally slow to load, the menu in the upper left corner is still not working on my phone. But phone app aside, if it's an available option I suppose it's worth considering. Picking a recent movie and comparing it on both IMDB and themoviedb.org I found the Actor descriptions to generally be more thorough on IMDB. Perhaps overall though the metadata is more easily accessible so it's worth seeing what they say when they get back to you.

I'm still curious, as part of this discussion, how MyMovies with all it's users (and apps) are able to poll from IMDB as frequently as it does if there are in fact these restrictions you've mentioned. Every time I go into Collection Management I generally poll from IMDB to update a new movie I'm adding and populate at least Cast and Crew information.

[Pauven]

I'll have to look closer at the IMDB data and terms of use. There may be a way it can be used. I've been thinking about different ideas on how to incorporate external metadata into CMC, and some of those ideas may be more compatible with IMDB.

I can't say how MM is allowed to use it, I'm not privy on those matters (for all we know they pay for access), but it is important to remember that CMC/CCC is very different than MMCM. In MMCM you must manually click a button to initiate data retrieval, and you're pulling back a limited set of data. In CMC/CCC, this data retrieval would be automatic and potentially large-scale.