Although I've been unable to find confirmation elsewhere, apparently IMDB doesn't give permission for programs to scrape info about movies --> http://xbmc.org/forum/showpost.php?p=272064&postcount=18

Can I assume that this will also affect the mythvideo plugin?

So, it's OK for us to buy (oh, excuse me -- "pay for the extreme privilege to experience its magnanimously instructional influence" per person per viewing) DVD's and Blu-Rays as long as we can't look up information about them via software?

"OH, LOOKEE!! ANOTHER UNDESERVED STREAM OF REVENUE!!!"

This will not do. I can assure all of you that the entertainment industry will rue the day that I was born. So, get ready to entertain yourselves for a few years while I chop them off at the ankles.

I'm seriously, you guys! :mad:

You can download the whole imdb database for free, see the link on the following page:


http://www.imdb.com/interfaces


much better than scraping


On this page it says scraping prohibited:

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions

"Robots and Screen Scraping: You may not use data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on this site, except with our express written consent as noted below."

You can download the whole imdb database for free, see the link on the following page:


http://www.imdb.com/interfaces


much better than scraping


On this page it says scraping prohibited:

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions

"Robots and Screen Scraping: You may not use data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on this site, except with our express written consent as noted below."

Thank you for curbing my fury. Of course, I can understand how bandwidth may be an issue where scraping is involved. But, how do we adapt this to mythvideo and XBMC? I guess we write a script that downloads the WHOLE database, and then modify mythvideo and XBMC to search it locally?

You have to download the whole db only once as there are also diff files released regularly that you can download afterwards for updates.

Of course any software that was written to screen-scrape needs to be modified to look in these files locally, but that shouldn't be too difficult (at least for the authors of the software).

I wonder if this database you can download includes movie posters?

I wonder if this database you can download includes movie posters?

no pictures or posters, it's only the text information