OV Berlin

https://ovberlin.com

Find English-language (OV/OmU) movie screenings in Berlin.

I don't speak German, so finding movies in their original language is a pain. This scrapes cinema websites, enriches them with TMDB metadata, and publishes a clean static site to Cloudflare Pages. Updated every 12 hours.

Quick start

# Build
cargo build --release

# Scrape showtimes (pulls metadata from TMDB if API key is set)
film-finder scrape

# Generate static site
film-finder static

# Deploy to Cloudflare Pages
film-finder deploy

# Or run the full loop (scrape + static + deploy every 12h)
film-finder serve

Docker

# Build and run
docker compose up -d

# One-shot scrape
docker compose run --rm film-finder scrape

# Logs
docker compose logs -f

The container runs film-finder serve in the foreground, persisting the database and generated HTML in a Docker volume.

Configuration

Create a .env file with:

# Required for movie metadata (free at https://www.themoviedb.org/settings/api)
TMDB_API_KEY=your_key_here

# Required for deployment
CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID=your_account_id
CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN=your_api_token
CLOUDFLARE_PROJECT_NAME=your_project_name

# Optional
UPDATE_INTERVAL_HOURS=12
STATIC_OUTPUT_DIR=html
SOCKS_PROXY=socks5://host:port

The SOCKS_PROXY variable routes all scraping traffic through a SOCKS5 proxy, useful when running from cloud IPs that might be blocked. The Cloudflare deployment is not affected.

If no TMDB_API_KEY is set, scraping still works -- you just won't get enriched metadata.

Commands

film-finder scrape          Fetch latest showtimes from all sources
film-finder films           List all movies with screening counts
film-finder list            Show all upcoming screenings
film-finder ov              Show only OV/OmU screenings
film-finder search <query>  Search for a movie by title (--ov for OV only)
film-finder static [path]   Generate static website (default: html/)
film-finder deploy          Deploy static site to Cloudflare Pages
film-finder serve           Start service (scrape + static + deploy every N hours)
film-finder stop            Stop the background service
film-finder db-reset        Delete the database and start fresh

Deploying to Cloudflare Pages

1. Create a Cloudflare Pages project:

   • Go to https://dash.cloudflare.com/ > Pages > Create a project > Direct Upload
   • Name it (e.g., ov-berlin)
   • Upload any placeholder file to create the project

2. Get your Cloudflare credentials:

   • Account ID: Found in the right sidebar of your Cloudflare dashboard
   • API Token: Create at https://dash.cloudflare.com/profile/api-tokens
     • Use "Create Custom Token"
     • Permissions: Account > Cloudflare Pages > Edit

3. Add credentials to .env and run film-finder deploy

Your site will be available at https://<project-name>.pages.dev.

What it scrapes

Source	Theaters
UCI Kinowelt	Eastgate, East Side Gallery, Gropius Passagen, Potsdam
CineStar	CUBIX Alexanderplatz, Tegel, Hellersdorf, KulturBrauerei
Yorck Kinos	14 theaters (Babylon, Cinema Paris, Delphi, Odeon, Passage, Rollberg, etc.)
critic.de	~50 Berlin cinemas with OV screenings

OV = Original Version (no dubbing) OmU = Original mit Untertiteln (original with German subtitles) OmeU = Original mit englischen Untertiteln (original with English subtitles)

Makefile

make help          # Show all targets
make build         # Dev build
make release       # Optimized build
make test          # Run tests
make docker-build  # Build Docker image
make docker-up     # Start container
make docker-scrape # One-shot scrape in container

Adding more cinemas

1. Create src/scrapers/whatever.rs
2. Implement the Scraper trait (see uci.rs for an example)
3. Add it to the scraper list in main.rs

The main things to figure out for each site:

• How to get the program page for each theater
• How movie containers are structured in the HTML
• Where showtime links are and how dates/times are encoded
• How OV screenings are marked (usually a CSS class or legend)

Building

Needs Rust 1.70+ and cargo build --release. Compiles to a single binary with SQLite statically linked.