Prime Browse

I'd like to find movies to watch from Amazon Prime Instant Video, but I hate the Amazon UI. It's cluttered with videos that aren't Prime eligible, shows only a few covers at a time without any useful metadata, and doesn't provide useful ways to filter results. I wrote some scripts to scrape the data from Amazon's website, put it into an Elasticsearch server, and make it browse-able with a simple web front end.

Setup

Requirements:

• a web server
• Recline library (https://github.com/okfn/recline)
• Elasticsearch backend (https://github.com/okfn/elasticsearch.js/)
• Elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org/)
• Python 2.7.x with BeautifulSoap, pyelasticsearch, and selenium modules

Elasticsearch setup

• create the prime index
• run setup.py to create the video mapping
• run prime_video.py to scrape data from Amazon's site into Elasticsearch index; re-run weekly to get new data
• run add_metadata.py to update video documents with metadata; repeat until no records have a missing metadata field

webapp setup

• copy webapp directory to web server
• copy recline to webapp_dir/lib/
• copy elasticsearch.js to webapp_dir/lib/
• point browser to webserver/index.html

TODO

• scroll left nav with content
• color queue button on click in Chrome
• remove from queue filtered list on de-select
• hide regular version if HD version available
• add not found genre if no metadata
• better metadata?
• get data from recently added (7 days)
• verify that videos are still available in Prime