Chitralu - Telugu Movie Aggregator

Aggregated Information About Regional Movies

Period: Sep 2013 - Nov 2013

This was one of my pet projects

(more of an itch I wanted to solve for myself)

Chitralu.com is a Telugu Movie aggregator which crawls information from several sources which have unorganized and incomplete information. The application tries to merge data based on the year, name from these sources. The app shows

  • Transliterated name (from local language to English)
  • Year of release
  • Information from ungoverned authoritative sources like Youtube Channels
  • List of Songs
  • All the videos are from a curated list of Youtube’s channels
  • Internationalisation support for Telugu

The Information was crawled from

  • Wikipedia
  • Youtube
  • Raaga.com
  • Bookmyshow
  • Flipkart
  • imdb
  • Few other telugu movie review sites
  • CBFC ( I modified a .NET script for getting this information)

List Of Modules

  1. Crawlers
  2. Movie Info Fetcher from Youtube API
  3. Aggregates movies from various sources into a single entity so that users can browse all information about the movie
  4. The front end consists of movie pages organized into a clean UI where users can browse based on year and other categories

Custom Movie Watching Experience

In order to enhance the movie experience, a custom interface was built using HTML5 and Youtube API to enhance user experience to watch subtitles & annotations in full screen mode.

For better user experience, I have added help information as well as Mplayer style navigation while watching.

Screenshots of Player playing content

Enhancements I felt improved my User Experience on top of the youtube API

  1. Play custom subtitles instead of encoding the movie
  2. Better seeking option
  3. Option to skip parts of the movie by providing seek to
  4. Full screen option with subtitles using the HTML API

Challenges Solved

  1. Transliteration names
  2. Repeating movie names over years
  3. False/Negative information from semi-authoritative sources
  4. Deletion of content due to copyright issues
  5. Regional restrictions for videos by Youtube

Technologies Utilised

  • Ruby
  • Rails 3
  • Javascript/JQuery
  • HTML/CSS
  • Mongo DB
  • nginx
  • Hosted on VPS (Digital Ocean)
  • Devops of hardening the machine