The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
API call for complete season information
posted by Michell BakSTAFFMOD on August 13, 2014 at 7:15 PM
Hi Travis!
I'm hoping you can help me here, as I'd like to avoid performing several hundred API calls to get all the episode details of a given show.
Ideally, I would love an API call that acts like the following call, but includes information for all episodes in the given season: https://api.themoviedb.org/3/tv/{show_id]/season/{season_number}/episode/{episode_number}?api_key={api_key}&append_to_response=credits,images
As you can imagine, it currently takes quite a lot of time to get episode details for an entire TV show. In comparison, TheTVDb offers an API call that simply dumps everything at once.
I'm sure you can think of something, as it would really help a lot in cases like this.
Reply by Travis Bell
on August 15, 2014 at 10:10 AM
Hey Michell,
I'm not sure about this currently. Our API is indeed quite different than TVDb's. I've created a new ticket for this, but I am not sure about an ETA.
Cheers.
Reply by Michell Bak
on August 15, 2014 at 10:36 AM
Sure, thanks!
It would just speed things up immensely. Imagine having to get episode details for every episode of The Simpsons. That's easily 600-700 API calls and could be changed to roughly 30 with the API call I'm suggesting :-)
Reply by Travis Bell
on October 2, 2014 at 6:00 PM
Hey Michell,
I improved this a lot with a change we just pushed live. The season call, along with each episode now returns the episode level guest stars and crew credits. That means you can query a complete seasons episodes and credits in one request now. We'll have to wait for the cached season calls to expire but this call:
Now returns this: gotham.json.
And of course, you can call it with
?append_to_responseto get the season regulars too:Which will return this: gotham_with_season_regulars.json
Reply by Michell Bak
on October 2, 2014 at 6:02 PM
You're awesome, Travis! Thanks!
Reply by Michell Bak
on October 5, 2014 at 10:51 AM
Oh, one more thing. Would it be possible to make this work with images appended to the response? The biggest issue really is the fact that I would like to avoid browsing through the available image sizes for all episodes in a given TV show.
The reason why I need information about the different sizes is that I wouldn't want to download a high resolution image on a low resolution device and vice versa.
Reply by Travis Bell
on October 5, 2014 at 11:16 AM
Hey Michell,
Unfortunately, probably not. There’s a a precedent that has been set in all of our media list responses and it’s important for us to keep things consistent.
The problem you’re describing is something that should probably be solved another way. The proper way would be to return an image object instead of just the paths, but that would be a breaking change. It could be a toggle, I guess. Something like
?include_image_detailsor some such param could work. I would have to give this one some thought. It’s a problem totally unique to TV episodes since we have higher resolution standards set in every other object.Reply by Michell Bak
on October 5, 2014 at 11:17 AM
Yeah, it is a unique problem. Just think there's a better way of solving it than having to query for each episode :-)