badsegue.org : a journal of creative computing
• • • • •

updates

Netflix recently updated the visual appearance of their site, which caused some problems for the Netflix Queue Manager and the Netflix Ratings Grabber. If you notice that either of these are not working as before, clear your browser’s cache to force the latest versions to load.

The changes Netflix made really seem to slow down page loads, especially on the queue page. They also reorganized some of the page elements, so now the DVDs awaiting release form is now inside the same form that contains the DVDs currently in your queue. This threw off the Manager code that extracts the page elements. That outer form is hidden when the Manager loads, so now the unreleased DVD list is also hidden.

The Ratings Grabber was updated to handle changes in the class names used on the Ratings History page.

Download Your Entire Netflix Movies You’ve Rated List!

Netflix provides the capability to browse your entire ratings history. But unlike your rental history they don’t provide a way to easily get your whole ratings history. This script will do the work for you, browsing to each page of your ratings, extracting the raw data, and collecting the results. The results are in a format suitable for importing into a spreadsheet, where you can do whatever it is you want to do with them.

installation

The script is a bookmarklet, which is just javascript that is invoked when you select a bookmark (or favorite) in your browser. Simply drag the link below to your toolbar or right-click to add to your favorites:

Netflix Ratings Grabber [Bookmark Me!].

usage

To use the script just go to any Netflix page logged into the account profile for which you want the ratings history, and select the Netflix Ratings Grabber bookmark.

The script will create an overlay on the current page and start fetching your ratings in a hidden frame when you press Start:

It will probably take a long time to download all your ratings. As each page is fetched in the background the status count is updated so you can track the progress. The results are placed into a textbox in, delimited with tildes (”~”).
You can use the links in the upper right to stop after completing the current page of results. Use the same link to resume. You can also reveal the hidden frame used to load the ratings pages; this will likely slow the process, so it is not shown by default.

When the fetching is completed or stopped by the user the results will automatically be selected, so simply copy the results to your clipboard (CTRL-C) and paste it into a text file. It’s easy to get this data into Excel or another spreadsheet package; just import it as a CSV file, and specify “~” as the delimiter.

Here are my top 300 rated movies.

update!

Now you can also download the ratings of your friends. When loaded, the script will try to gather all the Netflix Friends you have, and populate a drop-down list. The friends listing doesn’t have the same details as your personal listing, so you won’t have the genre, MPAA, and year info.