Foreign titles and IP-related IMDB differences, possible solution! (1 Viewer)

[ripk]

Hi RoChess,

There might be a way to force IMDB to reply in a consistent, language nonspecific way, by using the Accept-Language in the HTTP header of the request to the IMDB.

You can easily test it when using IE, just go to the Settings -> Internet Options -> General tab -> Languages and set the language preferences to receive pages in a specific language if they exist on the server. If set to English-US, it actually forces the IE to use the specific Accept-Language field in the header, which forces the IMDB to reply with English titles instead of trying to guess the location of the user by IP address and translate them to a local language.

I tried it with

http://akas.imdb.com/find?s=tt&q=Scent of a Woman and
http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0105323/releaseinfo#akas

and it works like a charm! I'm located in Croatia and when I remove all language preferences, I get Croatian tranlations for movies from IMDB. But, with English language requested, the magic happens

If there is a way for you to change headers in your HTTP requests to aka.imdb.com from within the scraper, you can then force the retrieval of the page in English language, which greatly reduces the guesswork on your side and eliminates the need for a lot of parsing and magic - at least everyone around the globe will receive same exact response as you do in the US. Unfortunately, it does not work the other way - if I set the Accept-Language to, say, de, I still get the page with Croatian titles (and not German, even though the server says Content-Language: de in response to my request).

Hope this helps a bit - as of recently I keep getting messed-up (translated) titles no matter what setting I use

 

[RoChess]

@ripk, I knew about the language accept header back in 2012, but it is not in my control to change that within IMDb+. With more active development effort from others available now, I might be able to get them to add support for that into the MovPic scraper-engine. It took almost a year for v1.6 to be released, so will do my best to get it on the schedule.

However, I have applied every workaround possible and IMDb+ should get the English title even for non-USA users. But IMDb site keeps changing things, and I can only fix/verify from a USA perspective. So anybody in a non-USA position that sees IMDb+ fail, will have to help me so that I can fix the existing workaround system to still get the English title.

I have modified IMDb+ to provide it with new options specific for that purpose, so that I get the IMDb HTML source code inside movingpictures.log, and then can find out exactly what source code changes Amazon/IMDb made and fix the bugs.

All I need is just one movie that fails and focus on that first. The log file from a single movie in diagnostic mode (need the green little bug icon enabled inside MovPic) causes 1.5MB type of logs for a single movie, and that is more then enough to fix the problem without things going crazy and then making it harder to see the cause.

So you can wait on my efforts to get MovPic expanded and include accept-language support, or right now help me fix the workaround system in place. Guess it depends how much in a hurry you are to get correct titles.