#FirstWorldProblems – having so many DVDs that you forget what you already own and end up buying multiple copies of the same movie. While 126 movies isn’t a massive collection, it’s enough for me to sometimes forget what I have when I’m pillaging the $5 bins at Best Buy and Target.
To solve for this, I created a Google Sheets list of my collection so I could check what I have from my phone. After typing all the titles into the list, I realized it’d be very easy for me to use the code I wrote for my DirecTV project to scrape additional details for the movies and create a nice, simple UI….so I did:
What it does
- Using The Movie DB API, I pull several pieces of information about the film and store it locally: title, image, release date, rating, budget, revenue, runtime, synopsis, genres, cast, etc.
- Storing it locally reduces repetitive, slow API calls and allows me to cleanly add additional attributes like whether it’s DVD, Blu-Ray, Google Movies, Amazon Video, etc.
- Adding new titles is easy – I just type in the name and the rest of the details populate immediately.
There are two views: one shown above for desktop and another, more compact view, when a tablet or mobile device is detected:
I’m not sure what’s next for this but it was a quick and fun project that connected my inner home automation and movie geeks.