genrewatch.com
A release calendar for every genre. Follow a genre or a name — a show, a film, an
artist, a rocket — and get told before it is out.
Sibling to tipoffwatch.com, which does the same thing for
sport. /sports here redirects there rather than being reimplemented thinly.
The one idea that shapes everything
A sports fixture always has a kickoff. A release very often has a date and no
time. TMDB says a film opens on 16 December; MusicBrainz says an album is out in
2026 and nothing finer; The Space Devs says outright that a launch date is accurate
only to the month.
So every row carries time_known and precision, and that flag travels all the way
through:
| Layer | What it does with it |
|---|
| Adapters | Store an undated release at noon UTC, never midnight — midnight is the previous evening for the Americas |
| Scheduler | Two reminder classes: minute offsets (60, 1) for timed events, date offsets (1440, 0) for dated ones |
| Pages | Never print a clock for a time nobody announced; an undated row is visibly different |
| ICS | Emits an all-day DTSTART;VALUE=DATE entry, alarmed 09:00 on the day rather than 60 minutes before a noon anchor |
| RSS + API | Say "Out Friday 4 September", not "Starts 12:00:00 GMT" |
precision of month or year is browsable but never remindable — a
representative day is not a promise.
The catalogue
category → genre → subject → event. A subject belongs to many genres (a show is
Drama and Sci-Fi and Thriller), so that edge is a join table, not a column.
| Category | Source | Key? | Notes |
|---|
| tv | TVmaze | no | /schedule/full returns the entire forward schedule in one request |
| anime | AniList | no | Real per-episode airing timestamps; 30–90 req/min |
| film | TMDB | free | The only key. Without it, film is skipped rather than broken |
| music | MusicBrainz | no | 1 req/sec, hard. See below |
| space | The Space Devs | no | 15 requests per hour, for the whole deployment |
| sports | — | — | Redirects to tipoffwatch.com |
Cadence is per adapter and enforced against the last completed sync recorded in
the database (genres.synced_at), never against a job timer — a repeatable's timer
resets on every deploy, so on a busy day a timer-based sweep can be pushed forward
forever and never run.
Music is thin, and that is honest
Measured against the live API on 2026-08-21, over a four-month forward window:
- MusicBrainz knows about 2,228 official releases.
- 11% carry a day. The rest are "2026" or "2026-09".
- Of the artists behind those, 25% have any genre tag.
The alternatives were measured too and are worse: Wikidata has 46 forward music
releases in six months, iTunes Search does not expose pre-orders at all, and
Deezer's genre-to-artist mapping files Bad Bunny under Rock. There is no free source
with volume, dates and genres together. Artist genres are resolved incrementally
(MUSIC_LOOKUP_BUDGET per pass) and cached — including the negatives, which is
what stops each pass re-asking about the same untagged artists.
The IMDb backfill
The five adapters above answer what is coming. They do not answer what exists —
TMDB's back-catalogue walk is popularity-ordered and stops after a few thousand
films — and that gap is what makes a reader's own VOD folder unresolvable: a film
released last month sits in their folder, has no row here, and so has no page it
could be offered on.
So packages/catalog/src/imdb.js walks IMDb's daily dumps. Free, keyless,
datasets.imdbws.com, rebuilt every night.
- It streams. Production Postgres is internal to Railway with no public proxy,
so this runs inside the container rather than through
psql \copy, and the
container cannot land a gigabyte on disk. Nothing bigger than one line is held.
- It links before it inserts. A candidate is matched against what we already
hold on
(category, normalised title, year), so an IMDb row for a film TMDB
already gave us enriches that row instead of creating a second page.
- It is bounded and resumable. A pass stops at
IMDB_DEADLINE_MS and records
the tconst it reached; the next resumes there. The first full walk takes a few
nightly runs.
What it deliberately does not give you is a release date. title.basics carries
a start year and nothing finer, so these rows are precision: 'year',
time_known: false — browsable, searchable and matchable against a playlist, never
alarmable. Anything with a real date still comes from TMDB, TVmaze or AniList, and
this pass never overwrites one.
Measured against the real dump on 2026-08-23: 1,708,507 rated titles, 428,513 above
100 votes (a 92MB map), and roughly 4% of title.basics rows kept. tvEpisode is
excluded outright — 8.5M rows, and an episode is only interesting through its show,
which TVmaze already gives us with a real air time.
| Knob | Default | What it is for |
|---|
IMDB_BACKFILL | 1 | 0 turns the whole pass off without a deploy |
IMDB_MIN_VOTES | 100 | A memory budget, not a taste one — the map scales with it |
IMDB_RECENT_YEARS | 2 | Titles this new are kept with no votes. This is the half that fixes new releases |
IMDB_DEADLINE_MS | 900000 | Wall-clock ceiling on one pass |
bun run imdb runs it by hand; --deadline=60 gives it a minute instead of fifteen,
and --restart clears the cursor.
Mirroring nichedb instead
The four screen sources above -- TMDB, TVmaze, AniList and the IMDb dumps -- are
also fetched once, for every site we run, by nichedb.dev
into its screen collection. Set
CATALOG_PROVIDERS=nichedb,musicbrainz,spacedevs
以上为 README 的开头部分。其余内容请阅读原文。 查看完整 README ↗
