OK, OK, I’ll just use tmdb

After last night’s post, I realised I was probably just getting too invested in somehow using imdb for the “who’s that actor, anyway?” command for my Emacs-based video player. Not only is it an extremely fragile setup that’s gonna stop working, but it’s also very slow — it takes half a minute to return the actor profile images. So I just implemented a tmdb API shim and then I ask it for the actor profile photo instead. tmdb doesn’t have as large a data base, but… The API is free (for non-commercial use) and is extremely easy to use. Things are now faster: The main wait is from the response from the LLM — I’m using gemini-3.8-flash. I’ve tried gemini-3.1-flash-lite, and it’s much faster… but gives the wrong result most of the time. No, that’s not Roy Scheider, Gemini! So now the setup is less Rube Goldberguesque. Sort of: I hit a key on my li’l wireless keyboard. It’s picked up by a Python script that listens for evdev events. It uses emacsclient to notify the Emacs running on the TV…

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