omdb

AI Prompts

Been working on an AI Prompt feature for obvious reasons, it's all the craze right now, and will single handedly fulfill many feature requests I've seen over the years.

A few examples of prompts:

• "Find me movies similar to [specific movie title]."
• "What are some top-rated movies in the horror genre?"
• "What are some classic movies from the 80s and 90s that you would...
  2023-05-27 03:48:23 +0000 UTC View Post

New JSON Response

Here is a first draft of the new JSON response, feedback is welcome!

• Dates changed to ISO8601
• Response returns proper boolean instead of string
• Runtime returns integer instead of string
• Cast array with "Character" name
• Language and Country returned as array
• Box_office and budget return as numbers

Maintenance Hell!

For the past few months I've been stuck in maintenance hell! 

• Some of the services I used for gathering metadata shut down.
• The logic I created to "automate" the Poster API only worked for popular films (shown in the image above) and I'm manually adding the missing posters everyday.
• The email service I use for sending out keys is switching to a more expensive p...
  2019-09-07 05:46:04 +0000 UTC View Post

Eight digit IMDb IDs

It seems that IMDb has finally reached the tt9999999 limit and has introduced eight digit IDs:

 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10044952/

I made the mistake of setting this column to CHAR(9) "tt" + 7 digits, which was fine for many years, but now it must be changed.

I'll be applying these changes later tonight, when peak traffic has ended, it shouldn't take longer than 10-15 minutes. I'll report...

Private Server for Patrons

I created a new subdomain for the private server: private.omdbapi.com

Which I recommend using if you are experiencing any timeout issues with the standard endpoint.

I'm currently working with Cloudflare to fix the timeout issues that enabling Argo fixed but it also racked up a $500 bill (double than what I expected) during a one week trial.

Argo routing is now enabled!

According to Cloudflare this will reduce the timeout issues and speed up HTTPS requests.

This little experiment will cost an extra $1000-$1500 a month, so I hope it works! If not, there is a Plan B.

API Timeouts (Error 502 & 503)

I've been running tests all day from different parts of the globe tracking down DNS routing issues which are causing the timeout issues.

As you can see from the metrics above when I bypass Cloudflare and access the server directly (even during peak traffic) everything works fine.

I'm currently waiting for Cloudflares response.

Happy Holidays!

For the rest of the year daily request limits have been removed! I wanted to thank you all for a wonderful year.

I have big plans for the API in 2018 and you can expect more frequent updates as I implement many anticipated features.

I'm especially thankful for all of you who stuck around when Patreon decided to make a disastrous change on how pledges are processed of which they rescinded but not till after many patrons already left.

Thanks for the support!

Would you stay a patron?

With the free registration process coming to completion, I'm curious how many current patrons will continue to support this project? I know it will take a hit (the first week of every month I lose 50-100 patrons and it slowly builds back up) I'm just putting this poll out there to plan my finances better.

Bring on the bugs!

Finally got GitHub setup to track issues.

Any SQL experts out there?

I have an active bounty on Stackoverflow regarding the rate limiting code I'm currently working on. If any of you have experience with high volume concurrent updates/inserts and isolation/tuning locks please share your recommendations. Thanks!

My neglected bug tracking site is gone.

Looks like BetaEasy closed down, so I need a new bug/feature tracking tool.

Edit: GitHub is the clear winner!

Good news!

Traffic has been cut in half and is continuing to drop daily! 99% of the remaining traffic is still unknown users getting 401 errors/invalid API key messages.

I'm working diligently on the rate limiting code so I can offer free access to users again. I also need to setup my own SMTP relay as the one I'm currently using can only send out a max of 250 emails per day.

I'll keep you posted on any new developments.

The API is going private!

After meeting with CloudFlare on Friday we came to an agreement this was the only viable option. 

To prevent any interruption of service obtain an API key and append it to ALL of your future requests.

How did it come to this? It turns out bandwidth costs money! CloudFlare has been mitigating this for us, but any option without them would merely transfer these costs to the hos...

Meeting with CloudFlare this week...

I'm meeting with CloudFlare on Friday to discuss our options going forward using their services. Unfortunately the API is 100% dependent on their caching, even with the new server.

We are going to analyze the traffic with some simulated rate limiting rules applied and calculate the costs, they already warned me that the traffic I'm currently getting would result in a "high bill", and they want to discuss a discounted flat rate option. However, I already know this discounted flat rate option wi...

Rating Changes

Here's why the Rotten Tomatoes ratings are returning "N/A":

After becoming all too familiar with Amazon (who owns IMDb) and Fandango's legal team on a regular basis, I've been looking into other options for returning movie ratings. With this proposed change, I would act merely as a conduit and relay an unmodified response from other service providers which is protected under the 512(a) "safe harbor" of the DMCA.

Hidden Feature - Full Series Details

Here is one of those heavy queries the new server can now handle that has not been released to the public yet.

You can return the full details of a series by adding &detail=full to your request:

http://www.omdbapi.com/?t=Westworld&season=1&detail=full 

2017-02-23 07:29:21 +0000 UTC View Post

Response Times (New Server)

Hope you are all enjoying the new server as much as I am! I ran some tests from different parts of the world bypassing the CDN caching (CloudFlare) to get the actual server response times during peak hours.

What I'm more excited about is SQL is only utilizing < 5-10% of the CPU, so I can finally introduce some more heavy queries that would have brought the old server to its knees.

New Server!

Good news, everyone! We got a new server! With the added confidence that our bills will be paid next month (thanks to all of you), I went ahead and ordered a better server. 

I tested it earlier in production (as you do) and it was returning non-cached results within 90-200ms and maintaining a CPU load of 15-20%.

Once the posters and SSL certificates are done copying over it will go live.

Thanks again for all of your support to make this possible!

More transparency

Monthly sales report of donations received in January.

Server Costs

Many people have contacted me about my goals/server fees, so I wanted to break down my current expenses for you all.

Dedicated SQL Server + SQL Web Edition: $238 (http://www.dedicatedsqlserver.com/servers.aspx)

CloudFlare Business Plan: $200

Comodo SSL Certificate: $8.30

Monthly Total: $446.30

These costs became more worrisome when ...

Temporary Server Pool (depreciated)

Update 2/18/17 - Server issues have been resolved and this subdomain will be phased out on March 1st.

Here is a private server pool I set up for Patrons only (please do not share it with anyone else):

svr2.omdbapi.com 

If you can easily deploy/modify your application to this URL I would recommend doing so. This is a temporary solution until CloudFlares rate limiting features are ...

Analytics of the attack

The API has still not fully recovered as most of the cached responses have expired causing more load on the server.