PocketMod Movie Listings
26 Jul 2007
Fairly Useful, print one out before you go out for the evening. When you and your date are at dinner you can check the times to see if you have time for desert.
You would not believe how difficult is is to find a xml or rss feed for movie showtimes. I mean really, you’d think that would be the first thing in most RSS reader/notifiers. Well I found one using dapper, it was ok, but I had some problems with the feed. So I rolled my own. The new interface is smarter, although I had problems with it hanging, I thought it was my browser, but now I think it was the site. It seems to work much smoother now. For this to work go to movietickets.com and find the 4 or 5 digit code for your movie theater. If you want to see if the dapper works you can test it here. The mod uses the xml feed to load the content.
If you have any problems check to see it works at dapper.net first. Scaping is not an exact science.
The movie pocket mod is great. There is one tiny problem, it seems that for non ticketable theaters, the daper isn’t picking up the name of the theater. I am trying to figure out how either the pocketmod or dapper could be modified to fix this.
The two that I used are also non-ticketable theaters. Like I said I had a hard time getting it scrape right. It is still not very reliable. I have also tried to scrape google’s movie listings as well still not very consistent. Sometimes I would try it and I would get the name, for one theater and not the other. Sometimes the showtimes were missing. I don’t if the source is bad or if dapper is having problems.
If you can find a better source or create a better dapp let me know.
I don’t get it (literally)!?
I click on download and I see the download page. I click on the download and get a msg to the effect “can not find your xml file”. I am guessing that a) the file on your end isn’t there, or b) I was suppose to install the software someplace special (which, of course, I didn’t)
OK, reading the README.txt file for PM and right clicking on download button seems to have me set up correctly, except restarting PM (offline Win version) still shows only a blank for Movies.
@Scott
What is the theater id you are using for dapper? Have you checked to see if the xml is good? Make sure you update you local mods.xml file to point same id that you used to test the dapper link.
Had the same problem, movietickets.com does not have the theaters that are in the area.
Ever consider fandango?
@Craig
Yes, I tried Fandango. Yet again, it is a problem with scaping the site. No one offers the movie showtimes in an RSS format.
Why don’t you just use the webservice provide at http://www.ignyte.com? That’s what I did…
http://www.ignyte.com/webservices/ignyte.whatsshowing.webservice/moviefunctions.asmx?wsdl