[HN Gopher] Aggregating all cinema showtimes in Germany with Clo...
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Aggregating all cinema showtimes in Germany with Clojure
Author : zonotope
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-05-15 14:40 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tonsky.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (tonsky.me)
| Tomte wrote:
| > It's a website that shows every movie screening in every cinema
| across the entire Germany.
|
| Nope. The first two towns I tried (with cinemas, and not far from
| his example Hannover) were missing. The third town I tried: also
| missing.
|
| I think it's obvious that there are more than the maybe 300
| cinemas shown on the web page in all of Germany.
| JaggerJo wrote:
| The first two I checked are also missing.
| shaunxcode wrote:
| Glorious. I vote for IMDB to be deshitified next!
| flotzam wrote:
| https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends#imdb
| bun_terminator wrote:
| but you still can't see where a particular movie is playing (not
| just in your city), which would be the entire point
| dewey wrote:
| Is the use case of "people who are looking for a city to drive
| to to watch a movie" really that big?
| toast0 wrote:
| Seems like it would be useful for movies that are in limited
| release.
| bowsamic wrote:
| "to drive to"? This is Germany, we have (very unreliable)
| public transport :)
| bun_terminator wrote:
| Yes. I live in the Ruhrgebiet, which is essentially a giant
| area of mid-sized cities, connected by a fantastic train
| network. The time to a neighbor city cinema is more or less
| the same than to my own. And I was looking for a place that
| plays the english version of LOTR for years now.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| > No ChatGPT/SEO generated bullshit.
|
| Amen.
| fewald_net wrote:
| I know it says no SEO, but you could actually create preview
| pictures for movies so that when a link gets shared the showtimes
| show up directly in iMessage or any other messaging platform. Of
| course only relevant until the showtimes change.
| fareesh wrote:
| is it viable to build a product on top of scraping?
|
| seems like unpredictably any day you could find yourself out of
| sync or with no data because of infrequent crawls or dom changes
| or bot challenges and then you have to play cat and mouse
| dewey wrote:
| There's entire industries built on top of scraping, something
| changes, you adapt. In this case where the data is actually
| used to drive more traffic to the cinemas there will be little
| protection. Very different to Linkedin protecting their user
| submitted data as that's their value.
| dewey wrote:
| There's APIs like https://www.internationalshowtimes.com that
| give you all that data for many countries. Have used it in the
| past and it works well, with direct booking deeplinks to the
| cinemas (select seat, next, pay, done).
| input_sh wrote:
| Do you know of any user-facing service using that API under the
| hood?
|
| I'm shocked to see my country included, but not shocked enough
| to pay at least EUR150/month for the privilege.
| dewey wrote:
| There's a list of apps and sites that use is here (the
| horizontal scrolling bit):
| https://www.internationalshowtimes.com/showtimes-api
| idlephysicist wrote:
| Who else noticed the pointers websocket for displaying the mouse
| pointers of other readers?
| cyberlimerence wrote:
| I hate that for some reason. Feels intrusive in a weird way to
| me.
| woodylondon wrote:
| This is amazing! Have the same problem in the UK - would love a
| site like this.
| tschumacher wrote:
| Congrats for building such a great site. I'm curious where OP is
| pulling the data from. I particularly like the Citydome [1] in
| Darmstadt, which is often showing movies in original language.
|
| [1]: https://allekinos.de/?city=Darmstadt&cinema=Citydome
| WA wrote:
| Ok, but a very interesting part is missing: how did you scrape
| the data in the first place?
| spapas82 wrote:
| That's the big elephant in the room... I read the whole article
| trying to find out where he gets the data from but no mention
| of that.
| msavio wrote:
| Niki, this is amazing, thank you for that!
|
| I just discovered they play Terminator 2 at Babylon Berlin
| tonight, thinking of going there, always wanted to see that on a
| big screen :)
|
| It seems like your list is not showing "OV", "OVmU" correctly at
| Babylon. Both Terminator 2
| (https://babylonberlin.eu/programm/festivals/scifi/7199-scifi...)
| and the mentioned Matrix
| (https://babylonberlin.eu/programm/festivals/scifi/7192-scifi...)
| there are OVmU according to their website, but that doesn't show
| in your list. I guess the data is provided wrongly.
|
| As someone who only watches OV with (if not English or German)
| English or German subtitles I would love to have one thing which
| movie theatres don't get: A filter for "OV" (Original Version).
| Thing is, they "have" it, but they exclude german OV's for a
| reason I don't understand.
|
| Example: Go to https://www.cinecitta.de/, and check the movie
| screenings. You'll find "Andrea lasst sich scheiden", an Austrian
| movie with original audio in German. But as soon as you go to the
| menu and select "Original Versions + OmU" they don't show it
| anymore, even though it is OV! I don't get that.
|
| So, my wish, Niki: Can you identify original German movies played
| in German as "OV" as well?
| croisillon wrote:
| and apropos Austria... could you add it to the website?
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| I wonder which DB is hosting all the data. My first pick would be
| Clickhouse, which should shine with all the data denormalized in
| a single table.
| fnordsensei wrote:
| The article says Datascript.
| https://github.com/tonsky/datascript
| Xplune13 wrote:
| Hey, this is really cool and helpful.
|
| I recently arrived in Germany and movie/cinema aggregation is a
| huge issue and a hassle tbh, so I'll be using this frequently.
|
| A suggestion, if I may, is to add language of the movie if
| possbile? It'd be great if there's any way to fetch that info and
| display it directly on your website instead of visiting every
| multiplex website to check it.
|
| Either way, thank you for this!
| akie wrote:
| In Germany they use these abbreviations for that:
|
| OV = Original Version
|
| OmU = Originalfassung mit Untertitel (original with German
| subtitles)
|
| DF = Deutsche Fassung (German version)
|
| OmeU = Originalversion mit englischsprachigen Untertiteln
| (original with English subtitles)
| Xplune13 wrote:
| Oh, ok. Didn't know about that. Thanks for the info!
|
| But, I still think that it needs some more clarity. Does a
| film listing not having any of these abbreviations default to
| German audio?
|
| Just a few things of this sort.
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| > Does a film listing not having any of these abbreviations
| default to German audio?
|
| In my experience, yes. The default is German without
| subtitles. I have seen the OV and OmU abbreviations a lot
| of times, but most showtimes don't have anything listed
| which will mean German.
| TillE wrote:
| Yes, unfortunately the default is German dubbing. If it
| doesn't say OV or OmU, that's absolutely what you're
| getting.
| Arjuna144 wrote:
| This is nifty! I like it a lot. Would be nice, if smaller cities
| are also included... I am missing "Detmold" for example
| rafram wrote:
| Google already supports this. No extra clicks or ad
| interstitials. Just search "<place name> movie showtimes" or
| "<movie name> showtimes". It works for every town I tried in
| Germany.
| tonsky wrote:
| Yeah, except that it shows like only 20 movies and 4 showtimes.
| I want to see everything
| Archelaos wrote:
| > It's a website that shows every movie screening in every cinema
| across the entire Germany.
|
| > And when I say EVERY screening, I mean it:
|
| Well, I checked Heidelberg and only "Die Kamera" (1 screen) and
| "Gloria" (2 screens) are listed, but "Karlstorkino" (1 screen)
| and "Luxor" (6 screens) are missing. So for Heidelberg the site
| covers only 30% of all screens.
|
| The "Luxor" in Walldorf seems to be missing too.
|
| I have not checked any other cities.
| philshem wrote:
| I found an entry for a city in Germany that I'm pretty sure
| doesn't exist:
|
| https://allekinos.de/?city=Bielefeld
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy
| elschneider wrote:
| Nice effort and for a second I thought you had fixed a problem I
| had, that most cinemas in my hometown have their own shitty sites
| and hence their screening times can not be discovered through
| Google, but turns out despite your bold claim this is not the
| case. Unfortunately there is no mention of any of the admittedly
| small cinemas in Tubingen. Your idea is still brilliant and I
| would very much appreciate if it worked as intended
| tonsky wrote:
| Damn Tubingen! You are the _third_ person who tells me about
| it! I'll find a better source soon, hold on
| BryantD wrote:
| Nice!
|
| I built https://seattle-movies.innocence.com/ out of similar
| motivations, although I limited my focus to arthouse/indie movie
| theaters. I also produce an .ics calendar feed which for me is
| the most useful feature; I like scanning upcoming movies on a
| calendar app I already use all the time.
|
| No DB under the hood, just a nightly scrape and process. Works
| fine. Sometimes the format changes and updates break until I fix
| them; not a big deal and the code is available in case I ever get
| bored.
|
| https://github.com/BryantD/film-calendar for the curious. It's
| intended to be easy to adapt to another city.
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(page generated 2024-05-18 23:00 UTC)