Last weekend I wanted to see the latest movie trailers. Of course, there are plenty of websites out there for this, however, none of them meet the excitement of watching movie trailers before a film at the cinemas.
So that’s what I set out to build. First, I needed to find a source for movie information. I don’t want to populate this information manually, so I found TheMovieDB has an API. This site is great because there’s a whole community of people dedicated to keeping this information up to date.
I linked in with their API and pulled down details of upcoming and now showing movies. TheMovieDB’s API lets me get a list of movies with one request, however it requires another request to fetch the videos (including trailers) for each movie. TheMovieDB has an API limit of 40 requests every 10 seconds, and if my site got popular it could exceed this and I don’t want to give out my TMDB key to any visitor!
Instead, I setup my VPS with a nightly job that fetches data from TheMovieDB and saves it to an Amazon S3 bucket. This job delays it’s requests to avoid the TMDB API limit and keeps only the movie ID and YouTube trailer ID’s. This method saves bandwidth and time, as visitors to the site only need to make one request to fetch all the data they need! As the entire site is purely static, everything can be hosted on Amazon S3 for simplicity and scalability.
Next, I used the YouTube Player API to embed trailers. This let me hook into events like when the video has finished so that I can start the next one playing. I was surprised at the level of control they give embedders, allowing me to prevent annotations, video controls and other distractions for a pure video experience.
A core feature of the site is that it only plays trailers you haven’t seen. To keep things simple, I used local storage in the browser to store the list of movies the user has seen. When the user watches all the available trailers, they can clear out their list of seen movies to start over!
This simple project took longer than I expected but I’m pleased with the result, and it’s where I’ll go to get my trailers from now on!
Check it out at trailers.jc.kiwi! Or view the source code on GitHub.
Edit, 7th Oct 2023: The domain has been updated to trailers.jc.kiwi
Edit, 21st Oct 2023: The project has been open sourced under the MIT license - see it on GitHub.