Deepanshu Goyal
Deepanshu Goyal

Reputation: 2823

APIs to get Movies, Music, TV Shows and Books details

I am trying to apply some APIs so that I can display and save Title, Image and Description of Latest Movies, Music Charts, Books & TV Shows on my PHP Website.

Currently I have come across the following APIs:

Movies: RottenTomatoes or TMDB API

TV Shows: TVRage or TMDB API

Books: iTunes RSS Feeds

Music: Last.Fm API or iTunes RSS Feeds

Could anyone please suggest me which one will be more helpful. Or if there are any better APIs than that ?

Also can I store the data returned by these APIs ?

I have been going through the Terms & Conditions, and everytime I read them I find something contradiciting. Please if anybody who has implemented these APIs can help ?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 7301

Answers (4)

Rycochet
Rycochet

Reputation: 2938

For Movie and TV Shows you could have a look at Plex.tv - there are quite a few sources used for each of those, and the data is stored on the user's machine (which probably bypasses the question about rights).

For books have a look at Calibre - again, multiple sources of data stored on the user's computer.

There's the obvious answer of finding sources of data and then contacting them directly - T&C are often obtuse and unreadable, but having an email reply that says you can do something gives a plain and simple yes/no answer (even if it contradicts the T&C - but generally you'd only argue if the T&C says yes, and the reply says no)...

Finally, an API is good for consistent data, but technically HTML is similar to XML, which isn't unknown as API results - so any website can be a source of data if it's easily parsed :-)

Upvotes: 0

Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh

Reputation: 498

I can't recommend any for music or know of any API that gives you Latest Movies and such, but for the rest I'll give it a shot. I've been looking into this for weeks for a project I'm doing to teach myself how to program and I've came across a few.

OMDb API - Movies and TV

Free, no registration required, and easy to get started with data all retrieved from IMDB.

It returns Title, Poster URL, age rating, description, IMDB rating, etc. Like I said, I can't see anything that would suggest it could show recent movies or anything, but until you find something to do that, take a look at this.

Google Books API - Books of course!

Also free with no registration requirement unless you want to use features that needs account access which probably isn't likely.

Storing Data

I originally misunderstood you here, so heres a quick edit: You should be fine with storing it locally as it is publicly accessible anyway. It's why the API is there in the first place.


I hope I've been able to help!

Upvotes: 3

Terry McCann
Terry McCann

Reputation: 312

I think the iTunes Search API is what you need.

Upvotes: 1

jordan
jordan

Reputation: 10812

I can't make any recommendations for TMDB, however I have used OMDB and can recommend it. It's free and open source so you shouldn't have to worry about saving data.

For the others, I personally wouldn't be too worried about storing meta data for books, music, or movies/tv as long as you're not distributing the actual product in an illegal way.

Upvotes: 0

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