Videos

Overview

Videos are, of course, the main reason IMVDb exists in the first place. We put a lot of effort into making sure that only actual music videos get into the database - not videos of concerts or live performances or anything else. That means you can use IMVDb data knowing that you'll get the right videos and the right sources.

Video Ids

Each video has its own 12 digit numerical ID that the video is referred to by. However, the actual URLs for videos have a more readable URL structure:

http://imvdb.com/video/{artist-slug}/{song-slug}

Note: for the purposes of using the API, you can think of each video being represented by its numerical ID.

You can find video ids by checking the right hand column on each video page. The ID will be at the bottom of the columm. You can also get video ids by searching data with the API.

Production Statuses

Every music video is in some state of being made, or it is already released to the public. On IMVDb, the status of a project is denoted by its production status code:

In reality, the most videos on IMVDb are listed as r - released. However, you may enounter in-production or other non-released statuses.

Video Sources

For released videos, we track the sources of these video on two sites: YouTube and Vimeo. Why only two? For one thing, these two video sites make up the vast majority of music video availability on the web, and also, YouTube and Vimeo have APIs that allow us to do important IMVDb things like grab data on views.

On IMVDb, we track every valid version of a video we can find. For many videos, this is easy if an artist has a YouTube page and uploads a video. However, some videos have special cases. Many times a record company will upload a video in addition to the artist. If it's an old video, there may not even be an official version, and a random fan-uploaded version may have millions of views. We track all of these version and then mark the most official (and best quality) version as the primary one.

Data returned for video sources provides the source (youtube or vimeo), the Id for the video on the source's website, and a variable letting you know if it is the primary source or not.

{
    "source": "youtube",
    "source_data": "zwT6DZCQi9k",
    "is_primary": true
}

Video Versions

Sometimes, music videos will have multiple versions. Each video data object returns a multiple_versions variable that is either true or false, and a alt_versions variable if < var>multiple_versions is true.

All music videos come with a music video version number. For videos that have only one version, that number is always 1. For videos that have alternate versions, that number increases and gets appanded to the URL. So for instance, for the 2nd version of "Believer" by American Authors, the url is:

http://imvdb.com/video/american-authors/believer/2

If a video has a specific version name, this will be available in the version_name variable. We don't count "Version 1" or variations on that as version names, but we do track official and widely-used version names that help explain a video's place among multiple versions, like "US Version".

Images

When a music video is in the database and has a source, we will have several image sizes available for that video. Here's an example data output for images:

"image": {
    "o": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.imvdb.com/video/...",
    "l": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.imvdb.com/video/...",
    "b": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.imvdb.com/video/...",
    "t": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.imvdb.com/video/...",
}

The sizes are marked by single letters and are in 16:9 aspect ratio (except for 'o'). These sizes have evolved with the needs of the site so they may or may not fit your needs, but 'o' is the original, largest image we can get for the source, so you can always save and resize/crop for your own needs.

Please do not hotlink these images from images.imvdb.com and instead save them on your own server.

IMVDb Picks

IMVDb is IMVDb's internal staff pick system, and each video is either picked or not. We pick videos based on what we find to be quality videos. We have only be staff picking videos since June 2013, however, so there is a large amount of videos on IMVDb where this data point is essentially useless. Howevrer, if you want to use it, a video imvdb_pick boolean variable is returned with the video data.

Verified Credits

Credits that have been verified are marked with a verified_credits boolean variable. This simply means that someone involved with the production at the production company, producer, or director level has verified that the credits are accurate. This does not mean that there are errors in the credits that have the verified_credits variable set to false, however.