Personal Video Database

With the complexity of configuring the programs needed to 'get all the information', maybe it's time to host a zip file (somewhere) that would give new users a working environment without need of an install. That's what Nostra had originally intended, after all.

Well, apart from installing python and its necessary modules, nothing else is to be installed. Whole /Scripts folder was posted as a zip file to be extracted replacing existing one and everything should work then.

Cheers and really glad to read you back again. I always considered you as one of the main PVD "think-tank pool" members. Now to see rick.ca and eventually nostra and the old crew would be complete, hahah.

Unfortunately, we won't see Nostra return (maybe be return), and rick.ca will definitely not return (I'm 100 percent sure of that, and on top of that, it's been almost 8 years since his last presence on this forum).

https://imdbapi.dev/ is indeed very interesting resource, but still it looks to me with limited data?

True. There are thousands of species of fish and yet I only eat a few of them, so how would I categorize them?
As a casual user, I don't have the same data requirements as a film student.
I'm impressed by your technical acheivement in piecing together multiple programs to scrape every single byte from IMDB. I remember you from times past, from near the beginning of PVD. As a moment in time, this is a huge achievement.
Every 18 to 24 months, IMDB updates it's HTML. I'm sure this just is a refesh of the site and the introduction of new technology. The last update came about when AI became part of the site. When the next update comes, you will be the only person that can resolve the issues.
I'll say simply, "Take what's given" and build from that. The 'dev' site is simple to get data from, and for those want more, you have that solution.

Please be specific which script doesn't work for you and post screenshots with a specific title when it happens as well as log.txt and other logs from Scripts/Tmp folder so we could try to reproduce and help you.

I've had considerable luck using PHP to download IMDB pages. OpenSSL has to be enabled, and you have to provide a valid user-agent. Both settings are in the PHP.INI file...just set it and forget it. If you set up a server @ localhost, you could relay requests to IMDB and return pages to the PVD script that made the request without windows opening and closing. I'm using CivetWeb64 server (a branch from Mongoose, I think). When it's installed as a service, it will start automatically when you boot your computer.

That doesn't resolve the javascript "click for more information" on the pages, but last week I found this:

https://imdbapi.dev/

For my uses this site is all I need. Since it's just JSON formatted data the format won't likely change, the queries are very fast and parsing would be simple. In my case, PHP also has a Json_Decode function to convert JSON data into PHP variables, which will simplify the creation of dynamic pages on my server.