blog.humaneguitarist.org

HammerFlix 3: Village of the DOMed

[Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:00:13 +0000]
Update, November 27, 2011: If you're looking for a live list of Hammer Films [http://www.hammerfilms.com/] streaming on Netflix you can see it here [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/HammerFlicks/currentVersion/HammerFlicks.php]. To read more about the HammerFlicks project, click here [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/projects/hammerflicks/]. ... Grrr. Obsession is a good ally for creativity, but it's still annoying. I woke up today and decided to have a decent breakfast and do some very light work on HammerFlix [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/tag/hammerflix/] – a small project to use the Netflix API to discover which Hammer Films movies are available on Netflix's Watch Instantly. Basically, I just added some buttons/Javascript that will allow one to filter out the non-matches, show only Hammer films that HammerFlix thinks are on Netflix, or show only the ones that are apparently available for streaming. Sure, there's still some work to be done to improve the reliability of the results as I mentioned yesterday [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/2011/09/24/in-the-can-another-hammerflix-update/], but I'm not too worried about it for now. If you're wondering why the search for "The House Across the Lake" from 1954 shows "Them! [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/]" as a streaming match it's because "The House Across the Lake" isn't on Netflix and "Them!" is the first match the API returns. In this case, both movies happen to share 1954 as the release year. Currently, if HammerFlix sees that the first API returned result matches the release year, it reports the movie as available on Netflix. So, I need to make it a little smarter than that, but not this weekend. Anyway, you can see the latest results here [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/HammerFlix/dev/0.03/HammerFlix.html]. Dorks can view the source files in this [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/HammerFlix/dev/0.03/] folder. The best thing in there is the MIT license generated by the Spiteful Open Source License Generator [http://www.bnj.com/spiteful-open-source-license-generator/]. :P No more coding this weekend ... time for a long walk sans electronics. ... Update: OK, so I lied. I couldn't resist. I just added a score for how reliable the match is. Go here [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/HammerFlix/dev/0.03/HammerFlix.html] to see the HammerFlix results from about 10pm EST [DEL: tonight. :DEL] on September 26, 2011. There's now a "match score" under each thing HammerFlix claims is on Netflix. This is done by comparing the title from the Wikipedia filmography against the "short" and "regular" titles from the Netflix API XML result (i.e. two scores). I used the PHP similar_text() [http://php.net/manual/en/function.similar-text.php] function to get the score for each and then averaged them for the "match score". There's occasionally a PHP "undefined offset" error for a couple of films. That's no big deal and I'll fix it later by just making sure I test for some stuff before printing to screen. But it seems to work pretty well. The "The House Across the Lake" vs. "Them!" mismatch only gets a 20% rating, so that tells me it might not actually be the same movie. And as a reward, I'm watching "To the Devil, a Daughter [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075334/]" now ...