OData Catalog API (Preview)

23 Comments

1. fronn – 2 years ago

   Awesome! This looks very promising... Am I reading this right? It seems it'll be possible to get the movies that have been updated since xyz date? How I've longed for this!
   
   It seems the actual Netflix IDs for the titles/people have changed to a ~6 character alphanumeric case sensitive format rather than the 10 digit or so number before?
   
   Also:
   
   The example for the "select" Parameter seems like it should be: "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Genres('Romantic Comedies')/Titles?$select=Name,BoxArt" (Name rather than Title)

2. JR Conlin – 2 years ago

   We're going to be officially rolling out short urls like "http://movi.es/BVqlK" with the next API release. You can see some of these in the OData, and feel free to use those to point back to the movie page. Those short URLs are not the same thing as the API MovieID (e.g. "http://api.netflix.com/catalog/titles/movies/70130686"), so you can't use them for things like queue ads or title status.

3. fronn – 2 years ago

   JR (or anyone else),
   
   1) Since there's no authentication involved (currently, at least?), is there still going to be a hard 5K limit per day? Or is going to be a "no limit, but don't abuse it - we'll be watching" kind of thing? Just curious (with the more advanced queries, I suspect it'd reduce my daily needs, really).
   
   2) With the new short urls rolling out, is there going to be some way of easily and definitively matching up a movie record by using the old ID value? I have a database full of the old keys and I'm not finding an easy and 100% reliable way to match up the movies with my current database if i switch over to the OData API - using title and date would most likely work, but "most likely" and 100% are different things.
   
   3) Is the OData API actually usable? I mean, can we access all the Netflix catalog and data from it, or is it limited to some subset at the moment for testing purposes? Can I use it on a live system? (understanding that "preview" means it may be down or formats may change?)
   
   4) Any news on when the next API release is expected to roll out (sorry if this has been posted elsewhere - I haven't seen it)

4. JR Conlin – 2 years ago

   1) The latter (no limits, don't be a dork, etc.)
   
   2) you should be able to get both the full api id and movi.es link out of OData (along with title information), or am I misunderstanding what you're trying to do? (i.e. you want to tie Netflix titles against IMDB)
   
   3) It's fairly usable, and you could use it on a live system should you so wish. Right now, it's being fed by the nightly index, so it's subject to the bugs we're having with that, but otherwise it should be fine. Understand that it was very kindly provided to us by the fine folks at Microsoft as a showcase for what OData can do, so there are some additional considerations that we don't have control over, but I don't see it disappearing any time soon.
   
   4) Sadly, not yet. We're working on it and trying to fix a bunch of issues before we roll it out for folks to play with (plus there are a lot of internal demands we have to meet before we start locking things in place). We really, really want to get folks using it, but it's not quite to the point where we feel comfortable unleashing it and not asking folks to radically change code a few weeks later.

5. Nicholas Clarkson – 2 years ago

   Instant/HighDefinitionAvailable is always returning false even though may Instant titles do have HD.

6. Ahmad Nassri – 1 year ago

   there doesn't seem to be a way to build a directory tree using Genres similar to: http://www.netflix.com/AllGenres ... or at least filter to the top level Genres only ...

7. Ahmad Nassri – 1 year ago

   also, some Genres are empty, but I believe that is due to the "preview" label of this API ... would be nice to know if and when this would be rolled out to mass production.

8. John McLaughlin – 1 year ago

   Hi Guys,
   
   I'm not sure if I should post here or not but the dates seem broken right now (they used to work fine)
   
   If I do a search for recent highly rated instant watch movies like this
   http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=AverageRating ge 3.5 and Instant/Available eq true&$orderby = Instant/AvailableFrom desc&$format=json
   
   
   I get a bunch of movies with dates like
   
   AvailableFrom: Date(32503680000000)
   
   Which is unix time in ms. If I convert it to real time it's something like 01/01/3000 12:00am GMT.
   
   Clearly this is not working -- It's returning movies that don't seem to actually meet the criteria..... (or am I missing something?)
   
   This query used to work perfectly....
   
   -John

9. Dick – 1 year ago

   Hi,
   Can I select just SmallUrl parameter in BoxArt to return?

10. Oregon_XJ – 1 year ago

    I'm having trouble with my search returning incorrect results. Wondering if the nightly index is not up to date since
    http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=AverageRating ge 3 and Instant/Available eq true and (Rating eq 'G' or Rating eq 'PG')&$orderby=Name
    is returning titles that are not currently available instantly.
    
    Any suggestions? I am also interested in returning a link to the netflix page, however the "select" parameter in this search seems to be ignored.
    
    http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$select=Synopsis, Runtime, AverageRating, ReleaseYear, Url, Rating, Name&$filter=AverageRating ge 3 and Instant/Available eq true and (Rating eq 'G' or Rating eq 'PG')&$orderby=Name

11. Jamie – 1 year ago

    Hey - will the People catalog be expanded to include photos and biographies? Would love to be able to get more information on this resource

12. lusien – 1 year ago

    I noticed that the feed's next link now includes a port number (eg http://odata.netflix.com:20000/Catalog/Titles/?$skiptoken='5qmk'). Opening this link results in a 502. Removing the port number ":20000" will make it work just fine.

13. uAreTheCritic.com – 1 year ago

    I notice that there are issues with ' in the titles of movies. For instance,
    
    http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=Name%20eq%20'Gulliver's%20Travels'
    
    That errors out. How would that be resolved. Your mistake or mine?

14. Sam Matthews – 1 year ago

    I was referencing the BoxArt.SmallUrl in my App.. and the images corresponded to the 'Tiny" versions in the API, but now they suddenly got bigger.
    
    Is the Tiny box art available on the OData feed?

15. zachleat – 12 months ago

    I have also noticed that single quotes are not allowed in the Name filter.
    
    Any fix there?

16. Hien Luu – 11 months ago

    It seems http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=ReleaseYear%20eq%202000 returns only 500 movies. How do I get the rest of the movies? I saw the paging options "top/skip". Please provide more details what does top or skip mean?
    
    Thanks.

17. Jay Thaler – 11 months ago

    When searching for titles named "Dexter" the ODATA feed only shows Season 1. The REST API shows other seasons. Is there something wrong with the ODATA feed?

18. Developr – 10 months ago

    I'm probably missing something obvious, but where's the episode number field? I'm sorting by id, but doubt that's reliable.

19. Kid_Niki – 10 months ago

    This is my solution to the escaping issue with single quote, double quote, and ampersands being in the title. I tested all other special characters and the search still produces results.
    
    var input = $("#txtMovieInput").val();
    input = input.replace(/'/g, "''");
    input = input.replace(/"/g, '""');
    input = input.replace(/&/g, '%26');
    
    var url = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=Name eq '" + input + "'&$expand=Genres,Directors&$format=json&$callback=parseJson"

20. Developr – 10 months ago

    Odata is incredible! However, the following Instant Watch Seasons report no episodes: btmmz,btrDm,btrNT,ca0QQ,ca0TL,ca16N,ca1AI,ca1iQ,ca2oG,ca2X6,ca2yP,ca3QY,ca3wn,ca3wo,ca47S,ca5Vm,ca5Vq,ca5VX,ca6A0,ca6Fk,ca8kA,ca8mN,ca8mO,ca8mP,ca8mQ,ca8mR,ca8mS,ca8mT,ca91x,ca9ro,ca9s3,ca9s4,ca9s5,ca9s6,ca9s7,caAJx,caAwK,caBTn,caCWe,caJMU,caKUb,cZg5x,cZiDh,cZj7S,cZmaw,cZoEs,cZoZN,cZpf6,cZqFt,cZqyp,cZrTf,cZsZ3,cZtKw,cZtma,cZtpX,cZtRm,cZtus,cZuEk,cZug3,cZvrP,cZw7d,cZwJM,cZx7t,cZxtU,cZxv6,cZySI,cZzbw,cZzHj,cZzny,cZzwd

21. adambp – 10 months ago

    The box art URLs are not working right now. Is it just me or is this expected for some reason?

22. wingnutzero – 9 months ago

    Why is so much data in the OData database wrong? For example: If I look up From Dusk Till Dawn (http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=Name%20eq%20%27From%20Dusk%20Till%20Dawn%27&$format=json) it says it's available for streaming (Instant/Available eq true) but I can't stream it on Netflix. Same for The Crow and a number of other movies.

23. Developr – 9 months ago

    I've developed a major app based on odata. Can we depend on it? And if not, what can we depend on?

Please sign in to post a comment.