Show HN: A database for browsing and discovering movies | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A database for browsing and discovering movies

movieo.me

296 pointsoldboyFX157 comments

Wow, after playing with it for 60 seconds my wife and I found a Humphrey Bogart movie we had never heard of that we are now going to watch. You should work on adding Amazon video links to it with a referral code, could be a good way to capitalize on this!

Amazon and Hulu integration is on our todo list. It's unfortunate that we can't pull Netflix data since they're shutting down their api in 10 days.

Ah, well, at least Amazon and Hulu have some sense :) Looking forward, I will be using this site frequently I'm sure.

Netflix's selection is too limited for my taste. Your app looks beautiful btw!

Seconded! Love, love, love the way you've setup filters. The wife and I are big movie and tv bingers (hate that word but that's the label I guess).

This is terrific and we've already found 5 movies that look exciting.

Amazon and Hulu links will be awesome! Netflix doesn't realize what the creativity they'll be stifling by shutting off their API.

Great job!!!

We're glad you like it! Thanks for the support.

Had seen an app demo from a Melbourne based company who does most of this and had an Amazon link. Haven't dived deep in as it was a UX testing session. Should I mention the name/link, not sure of the ethics of it when someone does a Show HN.

Wouldn't really benefit here as all you're showcasing is an Amazon affiliate link. If there's features they had over this one, or you were the person running that demo I think it'd be OK - but just for the purpose of showing an affiliate ID.. I don't think it's necessary. HN crowd knows what that looks like.

Don't know if it's a amazon affiliate link internally. Lets you browse movies and you can queue it or add them to watchlist. For each movie it shows if they are available on Amazon, Itunes, Netflix & one more

I assume you are talking about http://goodfil.ms/?

Naa.. I mentioned it in a reply to the guy who made this service. Anyway it's gyde.tv

Looks good, but the one feature that I find lacking (in this and other similar apps, like http://omive.com) is the ability to "hide" movies I've already seen. Because otherwise I have to go through pages and pages to find a movie I haven't seen, let alone consider watching.

Multiple people said this, it's a shame how we didn't think of this before! We'll be adding this feature during the next couple of days! Thanks for pointing it out!

Awesome! Will check it out back in a week then :)

That would be great!

Hi oldboyFX, how are you doing with this feature? I would love to use movieio.me, but right now it is too time consuming to use because of all the movies I have already seen.

Missing feature: Sort by language. This is especially important for massively multilingual countries like India. Choosing 'India' lists hundreds of movies, but I would like to sort it by language (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, etc.)

That's an interesting and potentially useful idea, but if you go down that road, I think it'd be immediately relevant to also go into available subtitle languages. It also really depends on where this site gets its data from, as the "from [country x]" filtering can yield some questionable results.

Good effort.

Finally I can see and sort by RT rating which I trust way more than imdb.

You could also somehow link it to "popcorn time" then it will complete the loop.

Also a separate section for "available on netflix" will make this indispensable.

You could even add a weekly newsletter that shows... 1. new movies on netflix. 2. must watch classics etc base on my taste 4. new episodes of [walking dead] available

and shoot it out on a friday :-)

We'd love to include torrent links or even stream directly but we're too scurred :<

The netflix is shutting down their api but we'll do our best go get their data.

This is pretty sweet, but wish there was a way to filter to show movies available on netflix.

+1. I can't believe that still doesn't exist on the web. I have Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Amazon Prime accounts, but nothing will answer for me "Can I watch this movie for free somewhere?".

Filtering by streaming service is a killer feature.

http://www.canistream.it

You can do this on the fan tv ipad app.

http://www.moreflicks.com/

Only netflix, but http://whatisonnetflix.com/ (sorts them by imdb or rottentomatoes ratings)

edit: I didn't realize they were shutting down their api to 3rd parties very soon. I'm assuming this won't work after that

With the exception of Amazon, who evidently weren't interested in cooperating, Tivo does a great job of this. You get some Amazon content but it's not the good stuff. For Hulu and Netflix you get unified search and you can do things like come across an in-progress movie in the guide, see that it's available on Netflix, and start watching it right away. I really wish Amazon would let Tivo have a decent app with Prime support.

Edit: Sure enough, as soon as I posted this I came across an article saying that Tivo will be getting Amazon Prime this fall, as well as Vudu. http://zatznotfunny.com/2014-08/amazon-instant-vudu-coming-t...

Netflix will be shutting down their API in 10 days. So unfortunately pulling their data won't be possible. We'll look into other services asap.

How about crowdsourcing?

Difficult but possible. There are some easier possible ways of getting the data. We'll be looking into those first.

Nice one. I'll definitely use this.

If you're looking to do something similar, this exact same app for books would be welcome too. Also podcasts, audio content (recorded letters), music, etc.

Discovery is an interesting problem. Between mobile apps & google's overall approach a lot of discovery seems to be based on giving you the right answer. Sometimes what you need is not the right answer, but a good way of browsing. I like filters and dials as a way of searching for things. It's fun.

It's good, but I recently found http://omive.com/ and it works great for me. Simple and very neatly built.

Just a tip, in case you find your way to adding it - while browsing through the India selection, I find that there are movies from different languages - I found Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil movies. My suggestion is that if you find a way to add a language filter, in addition to a country filter, that might help? This might be useful for others as well - for e.g a lot of Spanish speakers might look for movies from South America etc.

Related movies seem to be based on keyword search primarily, unconstrained by genre. But the keywords seem like sketchy content. Inception's keywords are "loss of lover dream sleep subconsciousness defense mechanism redemption," such that the top related movies are "The Science of Sleep" and "Sex and Lucia." Hmm... That doesn't seem quite right to me.

Similar movies are pulled from TMDB API. We have nothing to do with it. But you are right, in some situations similar movies don't make much sense. We have to dig deeper into this and find a good solution.

I love the UI and the results! I'd just say that I have two concerns; while the click-to-add nature of the genre list is great, I don't think it's immediately intuitive. Perhaps I'm just part of the old "if you click a link it takes you to a page" demographic, but clicking to add or subtract -- while in my opinion the right mechanic here -- isn't immediately obvious. Making it more clear how this works could save you some traffic by avoiding requests from people who don't immediately understand how the UI works.

The second thing is that, on browsing movies "from Japan," I immediately get Band of Brothers, Kill Bill, Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai, and the latest American reboot of Godzilla. If it's intended to show movies set in a particular country, that's potentially a really cool gimmick, but as it is it seems inaccurate.

Love the site, though! Great work!

No login works for me - Facebook, Twitter, Google+.

Thanks for reporting this sneaky bug (logins working fine for most people).

We're looking into this. If you could provide any additional info about the error, it would be very helpful for us! Thanks

Google+ login doesn't work for me either. Same symptoms.

None work for me either :/ really bummed because my girlfriend and I were just looking for movies to watch

You can do anything except add them to a watchlist! We did some fixing, please tell us if it's working now? It's hard to reproduce the error.

sorry for the late response. It is working now! Thanks for the fast support

Also won't work with facebook/twitter/google. I authorise the app okay, but the modal doesn't close, and I don't get logged in. OAuth callback not working?

Doesn't load main content for me in FF. Console says "SecurityError: The operation is insecure." line 2 in http://www.movieo.me/assets/after_load/application-f2fa75b0d....

It's working fine for me in FF 32.0.3 and Chrome 37.0.2062.120 (64-bit)

Very performant on the front end. Impressive.

Thank you sir. It might have been slower for some people since we weren't really prepared for this amount of traffic.

HN rules.

Great job. I like that you can combine genres, e.g. Science Fiction + Musical: http://www.movieo.me/?grid=grid_movie&file=movies%2F_movies&...

Potentially related- Vunify is a service for discovering and following streaming content across multiple providers.

http://www.vunify.com/

One issue is that i am not able to actually login with Twitter or Google+. Facebook seems to be working Google http://movieo.me/auth/failure?message=csrf_detected&strategy... Dont recall twitters.

WHAT i would love to have is a way to mark the movies i have seen and perhaps filter them out from the list ! That would make my life easier in picking up movies !

Other than that, this looks amazing. Great work

Hello! Could you please try loging in now and tell us if it works.

Hey both of them seem to be working correctly now.

Just that facebook login has vanished

Great interface. How about adding a small trailer button on each movie preview as well. Would save people time of clicking for a movie and then going for the trailer. Just my thoughts.

Already there. It's the play button in the lower left when you're in grid view, or the giant trailer button in list view :)

Looks good!

I think you have a small issue with the Rotten Tomatoes API, for example with the movie Lucy (http://www.movieo.me/240832-lucy). The page shows a 96% audience score, while the Rotten Tomatoes website says 48% (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lucy_2014/).

I noticed this aswell, it happens with audience score of some fresh movies (less than 1 month old). We pull this data from OMDB, so we can't really control it. We'll try to fix most of these cases manually.

Just out of interest which data sources are you using?

We use both TMDB and OMDB api's

Really love the site and bookmarked. For an anime movie fan it's tough to find a nice place that does all the things you guys do in a user-friendly way, so this is epic.

Highest audience rated animation from Japan between 2000 and 2014? Bam, there you go. That's how you help people. :)

So thank you for making this. If you need any extra help / feedback in return, lemme know.

That exact kind of search (and more!) has been supported on the major private bittorrent trackers for years. They also have the benefit of offering all the movies with a single click.

Interesting. Thanks. :)

We're glad you like it! Thanks for the support ;)

Checkout http://hummingbird.me/ for anime reccomendations. It's a similar idea.

The subtle UI stuff makes for a great user experience. Were there any other sites that gave you inspiration for the user interface? I didn't know this type of frontend UI was possible just using SCSS/jquery/coffeescript, hope is alive again! Also, APIs just let you download all their data into your own database? Thanks again!

I'm not sure if it was a direct inspiration, but the UI reminds me of Vdio (http://blog.rdio.com/us/2013/04/introducing-vdio.html). I can't link to the actual site as it has since shut down.

This redesign concept inspired me to start working on Movieo: https://www.behance.net/gallery/12321857/IMDB-Redesign

I took from some concepts by Julien Renvoye aswell. Check out his dribble.

Where does the data come from? TMDB is a great source. Letterboxd has a similar design and lots of curation features. Good job.

Letterboxd is beyond awesome, their only downside is suboptimal browsing experience. We tried to focus on just that!

I like the way you guys locally storing the information about user's last page and open it up when the user comes again.

very pretty and usable design. found some decent films already. overall, great execution – compared to similar services I've used.

I like that it works on mobile too, but why does the page need to be reloaded when I resize the browser width? upon resizing, I lost my scroll position and I noticed the text all became red at tablet-ish width.

Movies by Dan Gilroy is showing a random selection of films by other directors: http://www.movieo.me/director/57113-dan-gilroy?grid=grid_mov...

I see... we'll see what's up with this. Thanks!

This is really great, but it would be amazing if it had Netflix and Amazon streaming availability filters.

Second this. Seems like the second most important thing behind the movie ranking is its availability on Netflix, Amazon, AppleTV - e.g. I want to find the best ranked movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

We'll do integrations with other services soon. Netflix is unfortunately shutting down their API in 10 days so... yeah.

That and also a filter for movies you've already seen.

Awesome job. I'd love to incorporate your database into my movie app! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/moviedo-todo-lists-for-movie...

We don't have an API yet unfortunately. We got the data from TMDB/OMDB. You can pull from them.

cool!

Not really a criticism but more of a question as I'm not a designer by any means:

Why do you only use a sliver of horizontal screen space in the middle?

I only mention this because it looks slightly unusual on my 27"

https://i.imgur.com/rVxPCQG.jpg

Pretty much this. I really like what you made, but it should be left-aligned.

We tried stretching content to 100% of 27" viewport but it looked too cluttered. Imagine if you were reading a book where page width was half meter long. I hope you understand what I mean.

We could left align it tho. Didn't really try yet. Thanks for the suggestion!

Looks great. My company maintains a similar demo site where you can search movies by mood. For example, show me a funny movie that has some action in it. https://jaman.com/

Well done. I always have a very bad time when trying to figure out which movie I want to watch, most websites have bad navigation / filtering capacities / just unfriendly in general. Movieo solves that problem elegantly.

This is a really good idea, and a useful app.

Only suggestion: Number of ratings/reviews should hold more weight in the sorting algorithm.

e.g. Hollywood Buddha (2003) shouldn't be the RT Audience Rating second highest ranked film all time.

While I agree, I don't think attempting to perfect a ranking algorithm is useful beyond a certain point. At least for the topics I checked, it's reasonably close; there were a lot I didn't agree with, but then if it yielded my exact personal ranking, a lot of others wouldn't agree with it. So it's a bit of a roll of the dice, which in a way is nice, since there's just no ideal algorithm to be found. Getting close, which in my opinion they have, is pretty great.

There are two rate by options "Top Movies" and "Strictly by rating".

"Top movies" take into account the number of votes and use the same algorithm as IMDB does for their top 250.

"Strictly by rating" does what it says. It sorts movies strictly by rating, and only includes movies that have at least ~8 reviews on RT, ~25000 on IMDB.

To be more clear, I suggest that Strictly by Rating require a minimum number of user reviews counted, and excludes movies with RT Audience reviews still in a "Want to See" status.

Is this being powered by freebase? I was surprised that the site wasn't user powered - that is to say, it is basically a UI with filters to browse an existing database. Tell me if I'm right.

We pulled all data from TMDB and OMDB into our own database.

Did you mean IMDB instead of OMDB?

OMDB is the Open Movie Database - http://www.omdbapi.com/

Great app! Was actually working on something similar as a side project. But you really nailed it! Awesome UI and great feature set.

Also I would suggest to add a random button. It's simple and a lot of fun.

This is brilliant. Loved the entire experience. Well done.

For Netflix I have built, www.flicksery.com to solve my own problem of searching for good movies. Unfortunately the API is going to shut down soon. :(

Login with Twitter and Google doesn't work. After authorizing , the "Please sign in" modal just stays there. I don't use facebook as a policy. So I did not try it.

This is wicked. It's slow, probably getting hammered by HN and/or has to retrieve data from various online servers (imdb and whatnot) but it's wicked guys, congrats!

Yep, I feel bad for our server right now. We actually pulled all data (300k+ movies, 800k+ people) into our own database. If it had to retrieve from various sources in real time it would have crashed long time ago. Time to upgrade the servers and cache everything into oblivion I suppose :|

I like this a lot. The only thing I wish it had was links to which streaming services I can go to to watch the movie, or maybe that is there and I just missed it.

It's funny... I'm so used to waiting a few seconds for Netflix's tooltips to appear I was very pleasantly surprised when I started browsing this.

This is beautiful. Add in information/filtering for whether it's on Netflix/Amazon Prime Streaming etc... and i'd pay a small fee for this.

Beautiful website, I love the look and feel. One suggestion, I wish I could navigate between movies with the arrow keys in the close-up view.

Will be adding that feature tommorow!

Came to request the same! Just curious, what's the stack and how long did it take you to build this? I love the look and feel... I am having some issues with signing in though. Twitter and Facebook oauth doesn't seem to be working.

The stack is

backend: Postgre/Unicorn/RoR

frontend: SCSS/CoffeeScript/jQuery (no css/js frameworks)

We've been working on this for the past couple of months in our spare time. TBH I have no idea how many hours it took.

The login was broken for some users, we think it's fixed now but were not sure...it's hard to reproduce the error. Please tell us if it's working now!

Just cleared my cache and tried logging in via twitter and facebook again - still no luck. Nothing shows in the inspector either. Are you using any CDN service? Might take some time to invalidate the cache if so.

It's pretty impressive that you guys hand-rolled the front-end, any reason why you didn't go w/ bootstrap or similar since it's supposed to save you time? (at least on paper) Personally that's what I tend to do myself but just curious.

I like to have full control over my projects. I have my own mini css framework with all the stuff that I use regularly. I find bootstrap burdensome and restricting.

Same goes for JS. Frameworks offer convenience at the expense of flexibility. Movieo only has ~1000 lines of handwritten javascript... I'd never use JS frameworks for such a small project. And I'd never use CSS frameworks for any project ever.

That's my opinion, but I'm also known for hating on frameworks all the time so...yeah xD

Cool work. I also liked the UI theme. Did you guys skin it yourself or used some theme? I really suck at front-end that's why I ask.

We didn't use any front end frameworks or themes. The "look and feel" of the site was mostly inspired by the works from Julien Renvoye, Gilles Bertaux and http://letterboxd.com/

I tried to steal without copying.

Have you got any technology/design stack used to build this .. looks very clean and intuitive from UI/backend prospective ..

backend: Postgre, Unicorn, Ruby on Rails

frontend: SCSS/CoffeeScript/jQuery (no frontend frameworks were used)

Good to see another example of a site that didn't have to buy into one of the trendy SPA frameworks to build a nice UI.

Looks great so far! Are you planning to open source it? I'm sure, many people would be glad to contribute, including myself :)

It's possible.

We didn't really expect this much traffic/good feedback. In the next week or two we'll be polishing the site and adding some much requested improvements. We need to collect our thoughts now and see what can be done concerning the Netflix integration.

Could you integrate with trakt? That way I could filter out all the movies that I have seen to better find recommendations.

I didn't even know about trakt untill you mentioned it. We'll look into it.

I discovered trakt a few months ago - it's great! They offer an open API and store the imdb id for each movie, so it shouldn't be a problem to integrate it.

Metacritic support would be nice as well. Metacritic converts the scales for each rater to a percentage and averages them

I want a service that i tell the movies i had seen and liked, and based on these tells me what i might be interested in

Like http://www.jinni.com/, http://www.suggestmemovie.com/, http://www.tastekid.com, .. or do a search for "movies like ..." or whatever at Google, or do an advanced search at IMDB ...?

This is beautiful, great work!

Small nit: top right corner says "Rate by IMDB" but I think you mean "Rating by IMDB".

Or "Sort by ..."

Facebook sign-in doesn't work. Wanted to put things on watchlist, but didn't want to enable Post to FB.

We would never post to facebook on your behalf. The login wasn't working but we did some fixing. Is it working now? It's hard to catch the error.

Good work, one thing I'll note is that the page was very slow to load on my phone, it look around 40 seconds?

I suspect that is due to it being frontpage.

Look awesome! How do you deal with copyrights ? For example, the images or the data associated with you display ?

Very cool. Thanks. One feature request: The ability to order by things other than rating, like release date.

Fantastic execution. Enough has been said about the great UI. I am interested in how you got all that data.

TMDB/OMDB API's, crapload of scripts and lots of patience.

Let me filter by RT score. Also, maybe always show the score? One could write an extension for that anyway.

Do you scrape the data or get it from a web service? What do you use for scraping in case of the former?

The thumbnails are coming from tmdb.org, so I guess he's using their API.

We pulled data into our own database from both TMDB and OMDB API's.

This is the interface I want on my TV!

For those of you who couldn't log in, please try again now and tell us if it works. Thanks!

If there was a filter for "Available to stream on Netflix", I'd be all over this.

With an option to specify country, as different movies are available for different regions.

I'm impressed. I've already discovered a few movies I'm adding to my queue.

this is pretty but man is it bad at recommending similar movies in the documentary genre. it might as well be giving completely random results:

http://www.movieo.me/14002-baraka

Might be usefull for someone but expected much much more given the title and the forum.

bookmarked. very intuitive & easy to use. looking fwd to updates. some movies are available for free on YT. perhaps they could be linked to. also whether streamable on netflix/amazon/... would be nice too.

I'm tempted to steal your concept and build a version of this for video games.

That's what I'd like to do aswell...

I love the subtle zoom effect in the grid when mouse hovers over poster image.

Very useful. Can you add links to amazon/hulu/torrents?

We'd love to add torrent links or even stream but... you know... we're scared :<

I like it. Might be nice to filter by MPAA rating additionally.

I am curious... how do sites like these make money? Youtube?

We make no profit whatsoever. Movieo is our side passion project.

We could make money through ads(lame, not gonna happen), donations(we could add a button somewhere, but like anyone's gonna donate), amazon etc. links(we'll add those to movie page).

Anyway I doubt we'll make any money on this. And it doesn't matter since that wasn't the point. We just wanted to make something cool that people would use.

Also, we use free stuff all the time. Programming languages are free. Frameworks are free. Sometimes it's nice to give back to community.

We'll be able to put it in our CV's I guess (nobody cares about those either).

Ok then have a look at these guys and you may get ideas on how to make money. gyde.tv

It would be great to have a way to integrate this with XBMC

Good job.

Heads up... seems to be two <head> tags on your home page.

this is pretty and looks pretty nice to use. I filtered by "France", and the list actually got only 1 french movie out of 5-10.

We are using data provided by existing API's, and it's far from perfect in case of countries. Many hollywood blockbusters have numerous country tags. For example if one scene was shot in france, or they partnered with french production or something, it will include the tag "fr".

We have some ideas on how to make this more accurate. We'll be improving it in the next couple of days.

This is brilliant, specially the UI. Loved it!

I love it! So awesome. Great job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com