What to watch?

Were you ever in a situation with friends or family when you decided to watch a movie together, but kept on arguing on which movie it should be? For me, this is a far too familiar situation that often spoils the mood. I blame the size of my movie backlog solely on this actually. Can’t we do this without the arguing? I think we can and I created the perfect tool to help…

What to watch is a simple tool to help decide on a movie to watch with friends or family. Each person can open it on their computer, tablet or phone and select a few movies from the list. If one or more movies are selected by all parties, it will be displayed as the common choice for the group.

How does it work?

W2W reads your movie collection from your device and stores them in a database with additional data obtained from themoviedb.org. The list is updated on the first run each day but can be initiated from the footer too.

When you and the other users open the app, it will show a random list of your movies. You can also choose to list the movies alphabetically, by date of addition or you can view the whole collection as thumbnails.

You can select the movies you’d like to watch and block those that you wish to avoid:

On the top right corner of the header you can see how many movies you (yellow) and other users (blue) have selected.

If there are one or more movies that all users decided to select, they will be displayed above the movie carousel. You can stop and start watching one of them:

To start a new round of movie selection, you can use the [Reset votes] link in the footer.

To help find cool movies fast, the app opens in random mode, but you can switch to an alphabetical listing or show the latest additions first by clicking the corresponding link in the footer.

Requirements

For this to work, you need a minimal web server with PHP and MySQL to run the code on the device where you store your movies. You will also need an API key from themoviedb.org to query the data for the individual movies.

Your movie collection needs to be organized in subdirectories with proper naming as this will be the basis of the API query.

Movies
|- Beat the Devil
|- Blood on the Sun
|- A Farewell to Arms

Installation

  1. Clone the repo from bitbucket with the following command:
    git clone https://tenchi39@bitbucket.org/tenchi39/w2w.git
  2. Import the database.sql file to MySQL
  3. Rename config-sample.php to config.php and fill out the needed entries
  4. Open the installation directory in a browser

Changelog

1.0.6
- Small tooltip in the header that describes what this tool is about
- Show other user's choises by clicking on their anonymous animal icon
- Reorganized footer

1.0.5
- Reorganized footer
- Auto refresh database on first use even when switching mode
- Number of total items displayed in collection view

1.0.4
Titles are shown under the posters in collection view
Newly imported items are linked in the notification panel

1.0.3
- Movies and TV shows now can work in the same installation

1.0.2
- Anonymous animals in the header

1.0.1
- Specified during import if a movie or a series was changed

1.0.0
- Added error messages for config.php

0.5.4
- Added ability to parse TV shows

0.5.3
- Added movie collection view to footer

0.5.2
- Demo mode

0.5.1
- Fixed Foundation issues

0.5.0
- Initial release

One thought on “What to watch?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *