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Nothing to watch – Experimental gallery visualizing 50k film posters
- pacman1337 1y agoanyone know where I can get the dataset used?
- qwertox 1y agoIDK, possibly the worst UX I've ever interacted with.
- williamdclt 1y agoIt's explicitly experimental. I don't think it had the goal to be "good UX" as much as "interesting exploration".
- HelloUsername 1y agohttps://themoviepicker.netlify.app https://themoviepicker.netlify.app
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- apprentice7 1y agoIt looks like a fun project. It may have not been designed to comply to the highest UX standards but to try and break things.
- kiru_io 1y agoIdk why people are always so harsh online. This is clearly stated as "experimental".
- qwertox 1y agoExperiments can fail. It's ok for them to fail. And while this one looks pretty cool, it's not usable, at all. Hence the comment.
- nikolayasdf123 1y agoimpressive. surprisingly got something to watch just now
- janfoeh 1y agoJust a heads-up: it's broken in Safari, because the app-*.js is served with Content-Encoding: zstd, which Safari doesn't support.
- Etheryte 1y agoI'm guessing you mean Safari on iOS, because it works just fine on macOS.
- janfoeh 1y agoNo, I'm on macOS — Sonoma though. Interestingly, MDN lists no support for any version: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/Content-Encoding#browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/... — apparently the table is outdated.
- sarthaksoni 1y agoReally cool website! What inspired you to create it?
- kruxigt 1y ago[dead]
- alexalx666 1y agohow to go back to device selection? I clicked hi-end but its slow on MBP M4 Max 64Gb
- stared 1y agoWhen I saw "Your device" I assumed it is about device for watching, not about specs of the currently used device. It should be communicated in a clearer way.
- jessyco 1y agoI found the labeling "potato" "mid-range" and "High-End" very clear.
- jonathantf2 1y agoEstimated my work laptop as "high end" and then Edge crashed.
- jszymborski 1y agoIs this the new furmark?
- mentalgear 1y agoI appreciate the effort but, this in many ways showcases the design problems of today that put form over function: high score for the FX, low score for usability.
- flint 1y agoI had a look, then heard the fan on my pc ramp up... 32.0 GB (27.8 GB usable) AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS w/ Radeon 780M Graphics 3.80 GHz
- stevenAthompson 1y agoI have 64Gb, a 9800x3d, and a 4070Ti super. It's still a little slow if I set it to the highest settings, but it's usable. Very cool either way!
- ramon156 1y agoMake sure to share the browser too :)
- flint 1y agoChrome in Windows 11
- Mashimo 1y agoTried different modes, but does not seem to work for me. Console just spams handlePointerOut hundreds of times. Once in depth mode I saw movie posters but it zoomed out until they where gone.
- svennidal 1y agoI have no idea what is going on or what is supposed to be going on. I opened up the console to see error messages, but there were none. But I'm pretty sure it's not rendering the way it's supposed to.
- probably_wrong 1y agoIt's right there in the title: there's nothing to watch. (Not working on Firefox mobile, but my guess is hugged to death)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- robeastham 1y agoThis is fricking awesome. It's the coolest thing I've seen on HN for a while. Love it! N.B. I visit HN multiple times per day. I've been a member of HN since 2010. My last comment was made in 2018. I logged in for the first time in years just to make this comment :-)
- smugglerFlynn 1y agoIt really feels like something out of "Web 4.0", like some random next-generation UX pattern (for better or for worse)
- robeastham 1y agoI agree, but then I spend a lot of time talking about and developing software for Apple Vision Pro so perhaps I see this in a different light to most. Feels like a great interface for random discovery and/or semi-random discovery within more tightly connected bubbles of taxonomy.
- weego 1y agoI don't get it. Good visualization takes complexity and brings clarity and focus to it. There's seemingly nothing connecting where things are placed or how moving in any direction will lead you somewhere that develops understanding of what's going on. It's just a massive grid with magnification and a pseudo voronoi effect.
- viatorMMMCMXCIX 1y agoAuthor here - thanks for the kind words!
- VladVladikoff 1y ago“Nothing to watch” is actually well solved by LLMs. Just give them a list of your favourite films and ask for some less known of films which are in a similar vein. An ocean of film posters is a cool visualization but doesn’t solve the problem well.
- kingforaday 1y agoAnyone else remember Microsoft Silverlight? When it came out, they had a C# & Silverlight published demo that was a movie library viewer similar to this -- not as nice, but good for its time (circa 2007).
- ilaksh 1y agoI had a boss who was bought into .NET to the point where he thought maybe the future was Silverlight (instead of JavaScript, which had obviously "won" at that point) and he wanted me to make Silverlight have the features that the desktop framework had at the time. Which I told him immediately that seemed impossible, but since he was so sure about it I would be happy to try (I had just been given a contract there). So I was decompiling .NET framework or WPF libraries or something (don't remember) and trying to get them to compile in Silverlight. I don't remember how long I spent on that task. Possibly over a week. I had another job last year where they kept asking me to fine tune an LLM to answer questions about text, but I was only allowed to feed in the raw text of a single document but not generate an actual Q&A dataset. I kept telling them that was not how it worked but they kept insisting I continue for weeks. I think in his mind he just thought I was just doing it wrong over and over and he was secretly training me by paying me to practice or something. I guess it's kind of sad how many jobs I've had that were a waste of time. I'm weirdly used to it so looking back it doesn't bother me that much somehow. It does irritate me in the moment though. I have a client now that wants to make an agent system for a certain platform. The previous day we had just been discussing MCP servers and what they do. But the next day he seemed to think that each MCP server was going to have an entire full custom UI and agent loop in it per agent instead of just providing tool commands. So MCP server became an agent. I think I explained how it normally worked and he seemed to maybe get it, but then I was trying to ask how we were going to allow people to use all of the existing MCP servers in their agents so they could combine them and the non-response made it seem like he thought that might not be important. Did not get an answer so far. I remain ever hopeful for our upcoming meeting though. Is this a sign of old age? Answers to something specific just become rambling walks down memory lane? It's interesting how it seems that I am generally well adjusted to how futile my life has been. Anyway, I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Silverlight sent me down this tangent.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoSomehow I swirled around for a minute or so and didn't see anything I would want to watch. "This gallery features a collection of the 50,000 most popular* movies according to TMDB" Yeah, there's the problem. I went to the TMDB site and tried sorting by popularity, rating … all I got was a whole bunch of recent films that look like all the reasons the film industry is crashing (you know, the kind of stuff you would see in a Red Box when they were still a thing). If you really don't know what to watch you could do a lot worse than checking off films on this list (the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die): https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List (And you have already seen a number of them I expect.) Elitist? Maybe. But if you can actually get through the list (I've been at it, casually, for several years now) you'll feel like you have acquired a film school degree. I think it's fine to watch "8 ½" and hate it — at least you'll know that you hate it now. But it would be sad if you never saw "La Strada" because you thought all of Fellini's films were impenetrable. "Marty", "Stella Dallas", "The Hustler" — just a few great American films that came to mind that I would have otherwise missed… But if the latest Guardian of the Pirate's of the Marvel Universe movie are your cup of tea you probably have no problem finding something to watch anyway and can pass on "The List".
- rfl890 1y agoSnatch (2000) isn't on it? Blasphemous.
- arp242 1y agoI'll add it – two minutes Turkish. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is on it, which arguably is a better film.
- timonofathens 1y ago[dead]
- zvr 1y agoI did not know of this list -- thanks! According to my Letterboxd, I have seen 757 of them already. It seems that there are different "editions" of the list, where new films are entered and some are removed, to keep the count constant.
- world2vec 1y agoWhen I don't know what do watch I simply check the list of Criterion Films and pick the first one that I recognize the title but haven't watched yet. So far it has worked very well for me.
- samsaga2 1y agoNice idea, horrible interface
- gethly 1y agoSome time ago, I wanted to create a website that would recommend movies based on rating from people whom you have similar movie ratings with but I was unable to get the necessary data as existing websites guard it. But it would be nice to finally have a functioning movie recommendation engine one day...
- alias_neo 1y agoAs someone with Tripophobia I really, really didn't like the "depth" option, but otherwise like the idea; seems like it could do with showing more of the posters and titles though as at one point about 10 flipped by in a second before I could read more than one or two of the titles and saw nothing but a blur for the posters.
- kikki 1y agoI love it. The UX is terrible but the visualization is very "outside the box". Experiments like this are important on the road to finding novel interfaces. Not everything has to look like a v0 shadcn app. Thank you for sharing!
- whatsanaccount1 1y agohttps://opensearch.westloop.io/poster https://opensearch.westloop.io/poster We created this as a demo for OpenSearch on AWS (we are AWS partners) but I really enjoyed making it and I thought it turned out to be really fun. Took the same type of dataset at the OP (I think we have 80,000 posters) but we used AWS’ multimodal embedding model to enable semantic search across the posters, as well as the ability to do a similarity search based on the posters. Eventually we will include AWS’ personalize as part of the service to show off some of the movie recommendation engine features they developed. Not commercialized there’s definitely some bugs, we built it for fun
- pacman1337 1y agowhere do I get the dataset?
- tutuca 1y agoOhhh this is really cool! A little bit better way to navigate back and forth on results would be amazing. But loving it, nice demo.
- DamnInteresting 1y agoWhoa, the first film poster it presented to me was for Koyaanisqatsi, a 1982 film I was unfamiliar with until I saw it in a Metafilter post just this morning[1]. Baader-Meinhof in action[2]. [1] https://www.metafilter.com/209750/Godfrey-Reggios-Koyaanisqatsi https://www.metafilter.com/209750/Godfrey-Reggios-Koyaanisqa... [2] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...
- phyzix5761 1y agoI think shows and movies used to feel more special back when media was harder to access. We had to wait for them to air on TV, and if we missed them, that was it. The scarcity made watching them more exciting and meaningful. Now that everything is instantly available, it all feels cheap and disposable. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons streaming services will eventually fail. If they want to survive, they need to find a way to bring back that sense of anticipation and urgency.
- viatorMMMCMXCIX 1y agoAuthor here. The Cloudflare traffic led me here - apologies for all the bugs and crashes. This was semi-leaked. I only shared the link on a small subreddit yesterday, I'm aware of loads of bugs and it’s never been tested on anything beyond a ThinkPad and an iPhone. To those criticizing the UI: agreed. To those criticizing the movies: also agreed :D As some commenters have already pointed out, it’s more of a tech demo than anything.