This page describes various alternate ways to access IMDb locally by holding copies of the data directly on your system. See more about using our data on the Non-Commercial Licensing page.
The Plain Text Data Files
A subset of the IMDb plain text data files is available from our FTP sites as follows:
- ftp.fu-berlin.de (Germany)
- ftp.funet.fi (Finland)
The files are compressed using GNUzip in order to save space and network bandwidth. Once uncompressed many of them make interesting reading and can be browsed using your prefered editor. The data in these files uses the ISO-8859-1 character set which is also known as Latin-1, with the exception of title data contained in the aka-titles.list. That data contains other character encodings which are specified as attributes for the non-Latin-1 encoded entries.
The Unix Command Line Search Programs
Col Needham's package of Unix command line programs can be installed on your machine. However they are no longer supported by IMDb and may require manual modification in order to run.
- ftp.fu-berlin.de (Germany)
- ftp.funet.fi (Finland)