tmdb_party 0.9.0 Released

Over the weekend I spent a little bit of time cleaning up some of the code and adding a few new features to my gem gem for talking to themoviedb.org, tmdb_party. If you’ve never heard of themoviedb.org you should really check it out. It’s a lot like IMDB but it is completely user generated and has an open api that anyone can use.

So, what’s new in 0.9.0? Well, under the covers I did a bunch of house cleaning, moved some files around and removed some useless extensions to core classes that were used internally and just cluttering up your classes. Nothing too special there, but should make the code a lot easier to understand and maintain.

I also managed to implement two new features that I’m pretty happy about. The first one is based on some work I noticed in forks by willchang and razielgn. They had both implemented the Movie.browse method from the api, but because of my recent changes I couldn’t pull either of them very cleanly. Since it was a pretty straightforward change I just added it myself, but kudos to those guys for making me realize it was missing. Here’s a little example of what you can do with this new method:

tmdb = TMDBParty::Base.new('key')
tmdb.browse({:query=>'Transformers', :rating_min=>3, :min_votes=>3})

There’s a number of different options, all of which can be found in the api docs.

The other feature I added is something I find really cool. This comes from talking to John Tajima who told me about this cool idea of being able to generate a unique hash from a video file which you can use to identify the video. It turns out that themoviedb.org api already supports searching based on the file hashes when using the Media.getInfo method. So I went ahead and grabbed the hashing algorithm, made a few changes and here we are. Here’s how we use it:

tmdb = TMDBParty::Base.new('key')
File.open('transformers.avi') do |file|
  info = tmdb.get_file_info(file)
end

This will generate the hash for the given file and use that in the query to Media.getInfo returning all the information for whatever movie that might be. Now you can easily figure out what all those randomly named files on your disk really are.

The last thing I wanted to point out was some work that Mange did awhile back adding support for retrieving results in different languages, lots more tests, person search and whole bunch more. Almost all of the methods take an optional final parameter for the language you want your results in:

tmdb = TMDBParty::Base.new('key')
tmdb.search('transformers', 'fr')

So that’s all there is for now, thanks again to everyone who has contributed to this project with code, ideas, comments and everything else. If you need help getting started check out the readme or give me a shout and I’ll gladly help you out.