Show HN: nextflick.tv – watch random movie trailers

I wanted to have a fun way of discovering movies to watch. I always thought the experience of watching a bunch of trailers, like in the cinema, works best for me. So I sat down and replicated that.

I already coded and launched a version of this 2 years ago (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35361279) but resonance wasn't very good and I got discouraged. I let the domain expire and - to my surprise - I got quite a few people reaching out to me asking what happened to it.

So I sat down and wrote the whole thing from scratch. Because: why not...

Out of curiosity, this time I decided to write everything in PHP. It’s the scripting language I grew up with and I wanted to get back into that “dirty hacking” mindset I had as a kid. Last time I wrote the whole thing in Go.

As I suspected, I was remarkably productive. No framework to think about, no unit tests to write. I simply hacked out line after line. For a small project like this, this seems perfectly fine to me.

I took me around 4-5 hours to write the code. In its final shape, it consists of 217 lines (excl. styling): 163 for the import job and 54 for the actual website.

My data source is The Movie Database (TMDB). They have a nice API that I scraped. As a database I chose SQLite. Since I have literally no write operations after I imported the TMDB, I thought it would be a smart choice. It performs really well so far.

Another couple of hours went into refining the filters that I chose to decide whether I import a movie or not. I changed them quite a bit from the initial launch, in order to come up with an even better experience. This is what I ended up with:

- English (for now)

- Released after 1965

- Have at least HD trailers (720p)

- Rated at least 6.0 on TMDB

- No adult movies

- No short movies

- No documentaries

- No concerts

This gave me around 5,000 movie trailers in my database.

There are a couple of known issues, mostly around trailers on YouTube not being available or not embeddable. I have plans to work around this by checking YouTube's API for the trailers before importing them. But I haven’t gotten around to implementing this yet.

I'm very happy to share this new version with the world. I'm still proud of having built something - even though it might be considered quite small. But it works and I have people who use it and are happy. What more can I ask for?