> It’s a website that shows every movie screening in every cinema across the entire Germany.
> And when I say EVERY screening, I mean it:
Well, I checked Heidelberg and only "Die Kamera" (1 screen) and "Gloria" (2 screens) are listed, but "Karlstorkino" (1 screen) and "Luxor" (6 screens) are missing. So for Heidelberg the site covers only 30% of all screens.
I've checked Dresden, and the best independent Cinema with the good movies is also missing. The scraper still lists the old variant from 4 years ago, so it must be an older scraper. He should really countercheck with other scrapers
Fun to see Dresden mentioned here, but I'm curious which theater you mean? Schauburg, Thalia and Programmkino Ost are there. I can understand the KiK is missing and Zentralkino is probably still too new. I think the Kino im Dach is no more and the KIF also unfortunately died :(
By the way, we also have kinokalender.com, which - as one really can't tell by the domain lol - is Dresden-specific and a great resource.
Kino im Dach changed to Zentralkino, and some Zentralkino films are missing. Which is bad, as they are besides the Rundkino the only ones which show weird one-time only films, which you dont want to miss
As someone who only watches OV with (if not English or German) English or German subtitles I would love to have one thing which movie theatres don't get: A filter for "OV" (Original Version). Thing is, they "have" it, but they exclude german OV's for a reason I don't understand.
Example: Go to https://www.cinecitta.de/, and check the movie screenings. You'll find "Andrea lässt sich scheiden", an Austrian movie with original audio in German. But as soon as you go to the menu and select "Original Versions + OmU" they don't show it anymore, even though it is OV! I don't get that.
So, my wish, Niki: Can you identify original German movies played in German as "OV" as well?
That would be highly confusing for a German. OV always means that it is in a foreign language here, in cinema listings. Adding OV to German movies would identify them as not German.
I know that does not follow from the meaning of the word, but it just is how the label is used.
Yeah, sure, people would be confused for a while, but as "OV" has variations anyways it could then be something like "DeOV", "Deutsche Orginalvertonung".
But honestly, it's not even about that being written there. I just want them to show up when I filter by "OV", as a lot of cinemas have that option on their website.
Luckily in Berlin there are the Yorck cinemas where they play OV's per default, so I ended up only going to their cinemas, only using their website to search what's playing. That's why I've only discovered now what Babylon is playing!
There's APIs like https://www.internationalshowtimes.com that give you all that data for many countries. Have used it in the past and it works well, with direct booking deeplinks to the cinemas (select seat, next, pay, done).
Nice effort and for a second I thought you had fixed a problem I had, that most cinemas in my hometown have their own shitty sites and hence their screening times can not be discovered through Google, but turns out despite your bold claim this is not the case. Unfortunately there is no mention of any of the admittedly small cinemas in Tübingen. Your idea is still brilliant and I would very much appreciate if it worked as intended
I built https://seattle-movies.innocence.com/ out of similar motivations, although I limited my focus to arthouse/indie movie theaters. I also produce an .ics calendar feed which for me is the most useful feature; I like scanning upcoming movies on a calendar app I already use all the time.
No DB under the hood, just a nightly scrape and process. Works fine. Sometimes the format changes and updates break until I fix them; not a big deal and the code is available in case I ever get bored.
I recently arrived in Germany and movie/cinema aggregation is a huge issue and a hassle tbh, so I'll be using this frequently.
A suggestion, if I may, is to add language of the movie if possbile? It'd be great if there's any way to fetch that info and display it directly on your website instead of visiting every multiplex website to check it.
> Does a film listing not having any of these abbreviations default to German audio?
In my experience, yes. The default is German without subtitles. I have seen the OV and OmU abbreviations a lot of times, but most showtimes don't have anything listed which will mean German.
Google already supports this. No extra clicks or ad interstitials. Just search “<place name> movie showtimes” or “<movie name> showtimes”. It works for every town I tried in Germany.
Congrats for building such a great site. I'm curious where OP is pulling the data from. I particularly like the Citydome [1] in Darmstadt, which is often showing movies in original language.
> The whole database is around 11 MB, basically nothing. I don’t even bother with proper storage, I just serialize the whole thing to a single JSON file every time it updates.
> But how do I search?
> Well, Ctrl+F, of course. We are too humble, too lazy, and too smart to try to compete with in-browser implementation.
> Wait, what about page size?
> It’s totally fine. I mean, for Berlin, for example, we serve 1.4 MB of HTML. 3 MB with posters. It’s fine.
Besides whatever technicalities, we need more engineers with this sober mentality.
I know it says no SEO, but you could actually create preview pictures for movies so that when a link gets shared the showtimes show up directly in iMessage or any other messaging platform. Of course only relevant until the showtimes change.
is it viable to build a product on top of scraping?
seems like unpredictably any day you could find yourself out of sync or with no data because of infrequent crawls or dom changes or bot challenges and then you have to play cat and mouse
There's entire industries built on top of scraping, something changes, you adapt. In this case where the data is actually used to drive more traffic to the cinemas there will be little protection. Very different to Linkedin protecting their user submitted data as that's their value.
Yes. I live in the Ruhrgebiet, which is essentially a giant area of mid-sized cities, connected by a fantastic train network. The time to a neighbor city cinema is more or less the same than to my own. And I was looking for a place that plays the english version of LOTR for years now.
> And when I say EVERY screening, I mean it:
Well, I checked Heidelberg and only "Die Kamera" (1 screen) and "Gloria" (2 screens) are listed, but "Karlstorkino" (1 screen) and "Luxor" (6 screens) are missing. So for Heidelberg the site covers only 30% of all screens.
The "Luxor" in Walldorf seems to be missing too.
I have not checked any other cities.