imdb
Most of you probably know about the Amazon
owned
Internet Movie Database, which is
quite a useful resource for movie buffs. I am even now somewhat trusting of the
user ratings, something I am usually take with a grain of salt.
Often times though I just want to quickly see what movies an actress/actor has
appeared in, or who directed what or look up a title without opening up a web
browser and waiting for it to load the page. It turns out you can easily do
this by
installing the entire
database onto your computer, granted it will take up a lot of room (over a GB
for me) but the convenience seemed to outweigh the space requirements, so I
decided to try it.
I tried to build the command line tools, following the README file's
instructions. The first time it wouldn't build at all and I had to increase
MAXTITLES in src/moviedb.h. The database then built without any complaints and
downloaded lots of data, but when I tried to run the collection of tools it
compiled, only a few of them would produce any results, for example
the
`lindex' and
`list' commands worked ok but
both
`title' and
`lguide' commands produced no output
at all which wasn't very useful to me. I spent about an hour reading the
documentation and FAQ but couldn't get it to work properly and finally gave up.