Netflix Movie Ratings Extractor (Includes IMDB Movie Data Lookup)

By Maarten — Last update Apr 6, 2009 — Installed 720 times. Daily Installs: 0, 0, 3, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2, 3, 0, 1, 0, 4, 2, 2, 2, 1, 6, 2, 2, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 4, 0, 1
Script Summary:
v1.5: Export your rated Netflix movies and their IMDB movie IDs.
Version: 1.5
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Netflix Movie Ratings Extractor (Includes IMDB Movie Data Lookup), v1.5 (05 Apr 2009) [source]
Export your rated Netflix movies and their IMDB movie IDs.

This script will scrape the Netflix pages containing your rated movies, extract the name, rating, etc, and try to get the IMDB ID for it. (To run the script, navigate to: Movies You'll Love -> Movies You've Rated, or click on the new "Your Ratings" tab at the top of the page.) A Netflix movie URL can be reconstructed like so: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/<netflix_id>/ If IMDB lookup is enabled, the IMDB title and year column will only be outputted if they differ from Netflix's title and year. An IMDB movie URL can be reconstructed like so: http://www.imdb.com/title/<imdb_id>/

This script is based on Anthony Lieuallen's "getFlix Revamped", which is based on Devanshu Mehta's "getFlix" scripts, which in turn are based on scripts by John Resig. I completely rewrote Anthony's script for version 1.0 of my script, but I learned the Greasemonkey ropes by studying his script. Needless to say I'm standing on the shoulders of giants.

Screen shots:
Direct access tab:
Direct Access Tab Screen Shot

Main interface:
Main Interface Screen Shot

History:
  • 2009-04-05: v1.5: improve IMDB title match algorithms (more matches overall, and less incorrect matches), add "LES" as another article
  • 2009-03-30: v1.4: add "Your Ratings" tab on top of page for easy access as script UI is now only shown there, use progress area for lengthy operations, output area stays scrolled to last line, checkbox labels are clickable to toggle options, greatly improve IMDB matches by using Netflix' alternate titles, add option to output alternate titles, remove AKA match option as it's not reliable, get closer to JSLint compliance, rename script to better match what it does
  • 2008-11-09: v1.3: let user choose which ratings to export, let user choose what information to export
  • 2008-10-25: v1.2: detect if user is logged in, detect if cookies are enabled, clean up GUI a bit, NetFlix -> Netflix
  • 2008-09-01: v1.1: remove use of Array.shift()
  • 2008-08-31: v1.0: complete rewrite using singleton pattern; processes all ratings; uses GUI for options
  • 2008-06-18: v0.2: added IMDB AKA search
  • 2008-06-17: v0.1: initial version: processes almost all ratings; looks up IMDB id

Known Issues (also see my to-do list):
  • The Netflix total ratings count may be wrong. In my case, Netflix reports a total of 1266 ratings, but there are only 1265 movies rated. (You can check this by navigating to the last page, and counting the number of ratings on it. In my case, the last page is 64, and there are only 5 ratings on it. That's 64 * 20 + 5 = 1265.)
    Nothing can be done about this; this is a bug on Netflix's side.
  • This script consumes a lot of memory and is CPU intensive, and it is recommended to let it run without doing anything else.
    Also, it's slow.
    For me, I've seen Firefox grow to 539MB, taking over 30 minutes to output 1265 ratings.

Additional known issues when the IMDB lookup option is enabled:
  • Year differences between Netflix and IMDB can lead to an incorrect IMDB movie ID. "Crash" used to be an example. Netflix had it as made in 2005, but the IMDB year was 2004, and as IMDB also had a movie called "Crash" made in 2005 in its DB, that one was incorrecly matched to the Netflix version.
    Nothing can be done about this. Either Netflix or IMDB needs to update their dates.
  • Title and year differences between Netflix and IMDB are the primary reason an IMDB movie ID cannot be resolved. In my case, 103 out of 1265 movies weren't found. You'll have to find and add the IMDB IDs for those movies manually. (See "Additional tools" section below for help with this.)
    Whenever the IMDB ID cannot be determined the script will write the IMDB ID as an empty string to the output area and continue.

Usage instructions:
  1. Restart Firefox; the script will consume lots of memory, so don't use the browser while this script runs.
  2. Go to Netflix and log in.
  3. At top of page find the "Your Ratings" tab. Click it.
  4. At bottom of your ratings page find the start/stop buttons and results area.
  5. Select the options you want and click the start button
  6. When the script finishes, you can copy the data in the results area to somewhere else (e.g. into a spreadsheet) for further processing. The first row has the column titles. Columns are tab-separated.

Additional tools:
If you chose to output IMDB data, there are some simple Perl scripts available to help further processing of the output.
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