[mythtv-users] MythVideo and IMDB

Nathan Poznick poznick at conwaycorp.net
Sat Jun 7 19:08:10 EDT 2003


Thus spake Adam Biskobing:
> When using MythVideo and trying to connect to IMDB to get video 
> information, I get the following error:  Failed to contact server
> 
> I watched a netstat as it was trying to connect, and it looks like it is 
> trying to connect to us.vdc.imdb.com, which looks to be the same as 
> www.imdb.com.  I can connect to it just fine in IE, but when trying to 
> connect to this with wget I get a 403 FORBIDDEN response.  Any idea why 
> this isn't working?

Well, from the 403 error, I would assume that IMDb is blocking access if
a valid User-Agent header isn't given by the client.

kraken at tao:~$ telnet us.imdb.com 80
Trying 207.171.166.140...
Connected to us.vdc.imdb.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /Title?0114746 HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
... lots of other crap, including an explanation about a User-Agent
header.

kraken at tao:~$ telnet us.imdb.com 80
Trying 207.171.166.140...
Connected to us.vdc.imdb.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /Title?0114746 HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.4b)
Gecko/20030508"

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
... the page



-- 
Nathan Poznick <poznick at conwaycorp.net>

To be proud and inaccessible is to be timid and weak. - Jean Baptiste
Masillon



More information about the mythtv-users mailing list