IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG2 video, Part 2

Back in April I released a script to create a MPEG video summarising a movie using data from IMDB, you can find the original post in the URL below to learn why I created such a script in the first place.

Today I’ve release v2.0 of that script, which is almost a complete re-write mostly thanks to Eric at yPass.net who contributed significantly. Thanks to Eric the script is much improved since version 1.0, here is a run down of what’s new.

v2.0 2009, 19th September

v1.2 2009, 17th July.

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

You’ll have seen reference to “spiffy animations” in the change log, take a look at the example video summary clip below to see for yourself.

As it stands the IMDB-to-MPEG script does what I require, so I will maintain it in it’s current form. However, Eric has been working on a new direction by adding support for NetFlix, creating a GUI with php-gtk and some other cool stuff. While Eric has shared the details with me, I simply don’t have the time to add all that good stuff to IMDB-to-MPEG, so if you like the sound of what Eric has been up to hop over to his site to find out more.

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Posted on September 20, 2009 at 8:48 am by Martin · Permalink
In: Audio & Video · Tagged with: , , , , ,

9 Responses

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  2. Written by Nooblets
    on December 26, 2009 at 2:29 am
    Permalink

    I need a bit more hand holding to get your script to work. Where do I unzip it to? Where should I be placing my video files to automate the IMDB creation a bit? I have something like 120 movies that I have made over the years. I did have them in this kind of structure:

    +/
    +storage/
    +media/
    +movie (YYYY)
    | +movie_title (YYYY)/
    | | +movie_title.avi
    | +movie_title (YYYY)/
    | | +movie_title.avi
    | +movie_title (YYYY)/
    | +movie_title.avi
    +movie (YYYY)
    +movie_title (YYYY)/
    | +movie_title.avi
    +movie_title (YYYY)/
    | +movie_title.avi
    +movie_title (YYYY)/
    +movie_title.avi

    I would like to know how to set this script up to automate the process of sorting and adding the summary to my collection of 120 movies recursively. Currently they are sorted by (YYYY) or year but I would love to sort them by genre. I should have started proper sorting when initially ripping. *kicks self in the butt*

    Please be easy on me if I’m out of line or asking the wrong questions. I would LOVE to get this working. Also is there any way to tie it into MySQL and create a database of it’s own separate of using the Mediatomb db?

    Thanks in advance,
    ~Nooblets

  3. Written by Nooblets
    on December 26, 2009 at 3:09 am
    Permalink

    I’m assuming you want it extracted to the $home dir?

    So a command would look like this:

    User@server01:~$php5 ./IMDB-to-MPEG.php -f /storage/media/movies (1990s)/The_Usual_Suspects (1995)/The_Usual_Suspects.avi The_Usual_Suspects.mpg -t “Usual Suspects”

    I think I have that part figured out, but how do I make it more automatic?

    Would it be possible to use my well titled avi files to automate the search? I used IMDB to name the avi files on creation, good old copy/paste… anyway.

  4. Written by Simon M
    on January 31, 2010 at 8:22 pm
    Permalink

    Hi,

    This script is very useful but I’ve found a couple of issues (at least for me…)

    So, I’ve got “/path/Movies/All/30 Days Of Night” (see the case of “Of”)

    The IMDB lookup for the title is “30 Days of Night”. So all symlinks created point to “../../All/30 Days of Night” which is not correct…

    Is this a known issue? Do all movie directories _need_ to be an exact case sensitive match against the IMDB title?

    Another example:

    /path/Movies/All/Anchorman-The Legend of Ron Burgundy” results in symlinks to “../../All/Anchorman The Legend of Ron Burgundy”

    Any ideas or suggestions?

    Thanks

    SM

  5. Written by Henrik
    on February 1, 2010 at 6:32 pm
    Permalink

    Hi, trying to use your script but i cant get it to produce the IMDB file.

    First of all i found some that some variable was misspelled. Then there was some issue with font size .. ( fixed with a ()-around the calculation), corrected those but i still cant get it to produce the file.

    When running the debug no error shows up.
    Everything seems ok when i look at the output.
    It finds the movies and fetches the data at IMDB.
    Moves the file correctly. But it does not produce the “IMDB” file.

    Do you have any clue about what it can be? Or where i can start to search? ( running fedora 11 and downloaded the script from your Code section)

    Thx in advance, Henrik

  6. Written by Martin
    on February 6, 2010 at 11:37 am
    Permalink

    @Simon M: I’m not aware of that case sensitive issue. I’ll investigate and post my find here.

    @Henrik: Some version of ffmpeg that are distributed do not enable all the available video codecs. Is it possible that ffmpeg on Fedora does not have x264 enabled?

  7. Written by Chris
    on February 6, 2010 at 5:22 pm
    Permalink

    Hello,

    I am trying to use your script to simply created the video file from the imdb search. It gathers all the data and starts to create the video file and I get this

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function imagecreatefromstring() in /home/chris/bin/IMDB-to-MPEG-v2.0/IMDB-to-MPEG.php on line 576

    What a great script, if I could only get it to work…

    Chris

  8. Written by Martin
    on February 8, 2010 at 12:25 pm
    Permalink

    @Chris: What version of PHP are you using and do you have the GD extensions for PHP installed and enabled?

  9. Written by Henrik
    on March 3, 2010 at 7:09 am
    Permalink

    @martin Not that i am aware.
    At this posting time I did not really have the time to investigate but i did a “ffmpeg -i infile.mpg outfile.h264″ and it worked out fine.
    Will look into it further this evening.

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