MovieBuff - a fun mashup that combines TheMovieDB & YouTube APIs

MovieBuff is a fun web app that I built to delve deeper into movies, know more about film personalities and check if a movie you're interested in is available on YouTube - really fast! Of course, don't expect to find the latest blockbusters or mainstream movies on YouTube. With some luck however, you may be able to find some movies uploaded by the production houses themselves for free viewing. This app can help you uncover patterns in the movies you like.

In the first tab, Artists, type the name of any film personality including a cast or crew member. An autocompletion menu will guide you in closing in on the name of the artist without typing out the entire name. You can optionally use arrow keys to navigate and select a desired name from the list presented. Upon hitting the enter key, the list of movies that the cast or crew member was involved with, will be displayed. Click on a movie link from that list and that'll show you details of that movie in the Movies tab.

You can also choose to start directly from the Movies tab. Search for a movie name from any place around the world and get an overview of what the movie is about. The info from the three tabs are interconnected - you can click on a cast or crew members name to know more about the other movies they have acted in or check if the movie that you just looked for is available on YouTube.

Clicking on the YouTube tab will only show links to videos that are most likely to match the movie name you searched for earlier using some heuristics like the movie duration. You can choose to use the YouTube search feature independently to look for not just movies but TV sitcoms or anything else you like.

This is a work in progress and I plan to improve it based on your feedback. So if you like it, tell your friends and if you don't, leave a comment about what can be done better.

This web app was built using jQuery, Twitter Bootstrap and Typeahead auto-completion plugin. It uses the JSON feed exposed by TheMovieDB  & YouTube APIs.

Update 10/Sep/15 - The YouTube portion of the app will not work as version 2 of the API that it was using is now deprecated and the changes in v3 are not backward compatible. Going by the comments to the official announcement on the API deprecation, it has also caused YouTube related apps on Sony, Panasonic "Smart" TVs to fail

I hope to update the YouTube functionality of my mashup to work with version 3 of the YouTube Data API sometime soon

There are a sizable number of questions with the youtube-api tag on StackOverflow which is a sign for me that there are issues using the API and answers for them too.

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