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Discover Movies returning the same results despite different filters applied..?
posted by hamzah_2000STAFFMOD on January 6, 2024 at 9:00 AM
I'm attempting to integrate the Discover Movie API into my project using the following URL:
url = "https://api.themoviedb.org/3/discover/movie?include_adult=true&include_video=false&language=en-US&page=1&sort_by=popularity.desc&vote_average.lte=7&with_genres=Comedy"
I've primarily applied two filters to ensure that the returned movies should have a minimum rating of "7" and belong to the genre "Comedy." However, the issue arises as the returned results do not align with the applied filters. Many of them have ratings below 7 and don't even belong to the comedy genre. Despite adjusting the filters to include or exclude certain genres, trying different minimum ratings, the API consistently returns the same set of results in the exact same order. This suggests that the filters are not having any impact on the outcome.
Reply by Travis Bell
on January 6, 2024 at 11:35 AM
Hi @hamzah_2000,
Comedyis not a valid genre. You need to use the ID’s.Would be a correct query for comedies.
Reply by hamzah_2000
on January 6, 2024 at 2:31 PM
That works, thank you. However, as per the vote_average field, it has a range of: minimum: -3.402823669209385e+38 maximum: 3.402823669209385e+38
I do understand that this is meant to hold a large number (not numerically), however i fail to see how this is appropraite for a movie rating, how can a vote_average be below 0? why can't it be any higher than 3.4? what kind of input to this field would return valid results?
thank you
Reply by Travis Bell
on January 6, 2024 at 2:51 PM
Hi @hamzah_2000,
That's just because of how floating point arithmetic works. 3.402823669209385e+38 is not 3.4, it's 3.402823669209385 x 1038, ie. a massive number. You can essentially ignore those.
The practical values on TMDB are going to be
0.0..10.0.