About LibIMDB

The LibIMDB Project is about creating useful, and hopefully simple interfaces to the contents of imdb plain-text files.

History: The need for this project has really grown out of the tv_imdb filter written for XMLTV. This perl script preprocessors a subset of the imdb list files, creates a couple of simple flat file indexes, which are then used to augment tv listing data with information from imdb. As more users started using tv_imdb, the more apparent it was that its scalability in its current design was limited. We quickly found that there were a lot of projects that used imdb data, but almost all scraped the data by querying and parsing html from the imdb web site. This was not an option for a program like tv_imdb which likes doing its own fuzzy title searches and whose users would easily kill the imdb site with so many queries. There are a handful of projects that were closer to what we needed, but none shared source nor provide the level of interfacing we required. So LibIMDB was started, spun as a separate project from tv_imdb to allow others to benefit from our effort.