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.

• IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG2 video

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

• Merged yet more contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
• Added usage instructions.
• Added categorisation by Certificate.
• Added dynamic computation of video bitrate.
• Added silent audio generation.
• Added a shell script to reprocess an entire film store.
• Re-added MPEG-2 video encoding.
• Improved video encoding speed by removing pre-processing with ‘jpeg2yuv’.
• Fixed spiffy animations when cover art is not available.
• Fixed spiffy animations on platforms that may have incomplete GD.
• Modified filename input so that an input filename is optional rather than mandatory.

v1.2 2009, 17th July.

• Merged extensive contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
• Updated the README to reflect Eric’s changes.
• MPEG-4 video encoding replaced MPEG-2 video encoding.
• Never released to the public.

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

• IMDB-to-MPEG

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.

• About The Usual Suspects (~2Mb)

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.

• Netflix Has a Developer API

If you’ve read my blog before you’ll know I run Mediatomb DLNA server with my PS3 as the client, You’ll also know I am working towards importing my entire DVD collection into my Mediatomb server. However, my wife wants to know something about each film in the library without having to dig out the DVD case from storage. My solution is to include a MPEG-2 video displaying the film summary in the Mediatomb library for each DVD I have imported so it can be easily viewed from the PS3.

My script is called IMDB-to-MPEG and I’ve finally got round to uploading it. See the Code section of my site for the download.

The scripts takes one parameter as input, a film title. The plotline, year of release, genres, cast list and running time for that film are gathered from IMDB and formatted as text. Here is an example.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

A boat has been destroyed, criminals are dead, and
the key to this mystery lies with the only
survivor and his twisted, convoluted story
beginning with five career crooks in a seemingly
random police lineup. (106 mins)

Starring Stephen Baldwin as Michael McManus,
Gabriel Byrne as Dean Keaton, Benicio Del Toro as
Fred Fenster, Kevin Pollak as Todd Hockney, and
Kevin Spacey as Roger 'Verbal' Kint.

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Thriller.

Rated 8.7 out of 10 from 227,964 votes.

The text is converted into an image and then encoded into a MPEG-2 video using the lowest possible bitrate/resolution that is acceptable to read when viewing on a 42″ plasma from my sofa.

Directories for each matching genre are created and also one for the IMDB rating (rounded down). The MPEG-2 is stored in the ‘All’ folder and then symlinked to the genres and rating for that film. I then copy my video into the appropriate directory in ‘All’. For example.

.
|-- All
|   `-- The_Usual_Suspects
|       `-- About_The_Usual_Suspects.mpg
|-- Genres
|   |-- Crime
|   |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|   |-- Mystery
|   |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|   `-- Thriller
|       `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|-- Ratings
`-- 8
`-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects

This code was lashed up in a few hours, it ain’t pretty but it works for me on my Ubuntu Linux systems, maybe it’ll work for you too