Access film details quickly
Get Movie Info www.snipca.com/39490 You may already know about IMDB (Internet Movie Database, www.imdb. com), which contains exhaustive information of the cast and crew for just about any film or TV show you could ever imagine. OMDB is the open-source equivalent, containing similar details, but available for third-party developers to add to their software without paying a fee. It’s what Get Movie Info uses to retrieve film details in VLC.
To install it you’ll need what’s known as an API Key. ‘API’ stands for Application Programming Interface, and is simply the gateway through which developers can interact with a service that they don’t own. The ‘key’ is a unique string of characters that unlocks it. You can get a free key for the OMDB database, letting you look up 1,000 films a day.
Start by clicking View in VLC, followed by Get Movie Info, then the ‘get key’ link in the box that pops up. This redirects you to a web page where you’ll need to click ‘FREE! (1,000 daily limit)’, and provide an email address, your name, and a brief description of how you’re going to use the service. ‘VLC plugin’ should suffice for the last of these requirements.
Check your inbox for an email from the service containing your API Key. Copy the
code beside ‘Here is your key:’, then click the link at the bottom of the email where it says ‘Click the following URL to activate your key’.
Switch back to VLC and paste the key you copied into the box beside ‘OMDB API key’ ( 1 in our screenshot above). You should only need to do this once as it will remember the key the next time you use it. Now type the name of the film you want to look up in the ‘Movie Name’ box 2 and, if there are several films with the same name, put a year in the optional box below to help identify the correct one. Click ‘Go’ 3 to send your query to the database, which should return with ratings, actor, plot and crew details.