Wade’s Geekport

I’m a big fan of Netflix’s recommendation algorithm, and have often used it for deciding on movies on TV as well. For years I have always clicked screen by screen on my DVR and entered the movie titles in to Netflix’s search box on my computer and used it’s predicted rating to help plan out my recordings. I’ve long wished there was some mash-up application that could make it easier, but was never really up on JSON and things like that to dig at Netflix’s site. Oh and something about it being against the Terms of Service. But I needed a change of gears the last few days and went to town.

This is just a proof of concept and certainly not the final UI. I was envisioning something Muine style with box art and such as well, but went for a quick and dirty Gtk.TreeView UI to test it out. The yellow stars are movies I’ve already rated, and the red stars represent Netflix’s predicted rating, or average rating of everyone’s vote if a prediction is not available. The heart denotes if it is a recommendation, and the arrows correlate to the predicted rating being higher or lower than the average rating. I’m also collecting if the movie is available on Netflix’s Watch Instantly service but I couldn’t find an icon I was happy with to throw it in the UI.

Behind the scenes I’m using Banshee’s excellent (in development) Hyena.Data assembly for managing an SQLite database. I was really impressed with how reusable it was, and it saved me a lot of time. I intend to dig into Hyena.Gui at some point as well. There is some cool stuff there, but it may be overkill for Heartflix.

I started with HDNet Movies since that was what I am most interested in, but I’ve tried to make the core classes generic enough that it will be easy to add other data sources. Right now I am comparing by title, year, and MPAA rating to ensure an exact match. Nice and simple. I looked at HBO’s site and unfortunately they do not appear to provide a year in their listings, but they do provide a director entry. So it looks like I may have to make it easy to match actors and directors as well.