How can I disable/reconfigure IMDB's automatic geo-location so it does not default to German?

Question

Since a few months IMDB appears to be "detecting" that I'm coming from a a German IP address and automatically changes the UI to German. More specifically it shows the Germany movie title when it has one.

This is massively annoying and I can't seem to find an obvious toggle to change this.

I do not have an account on IMDB.

Is there a way to prevent this from happening aside from an IMDB account (if that even helps)?

Answer 1

If you do not want to create an IMDb account and set your preferences there you need to:

Add X-FORWARDED-FOR with U.S. IP address to your HTTP headers. You can lookup example U.S. IP address from any proxy list, e.g. http://proxylist.hidemyass.com/.

The X-Forwarded-For (XFF) HTTP header field is a de facto standard for identifying the originating IP address of a client connecting to a web server through an HTTP proxy or load balancer. This is an HTTP request header which was introduced by the Squid caching proxy server's developers. A standard has been proposed at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for standardizing the Forwarded HTTP header.

Here are some simple instructions: http://sobizarre-en.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-easily-defeat-imdb-geolocation.html

You also need to remove any existing (file) cookies from IMDb in order to not keep using the settings that were assigned to you/your session when you first accessed IMDb.

In Chrome you can do that by typing chrome://chrome/settings/cookies in the address bar and then typing in "imdb" in the window that opens (click the x to the right on each row to delete. The x will not be visible until you hover over the row.)

Answer 2

Recently, the http://akas.imdb.com endpoint stopped working. By default, IMDb will now use your geolocation to provide localized content. However, you can override this behaviour by sending an Accept-Language HTTP header.

Using Ruby, this is how I solved this problem:

require 'open-uri'

imdb_url = 'http://www.imdb.com/chart/top'
headers = {'Accept-Language' => 'en'}
open(imdb_url, headers)

Answer 3

As @MathiasKegelmann mentioned, from IMDB's help you have two options:

• Create an account and go to https://secure.imdb.com/register-imdb/siteprefs to change your preferred language.

• Or by using this link: http://akas.imdb.com, you will always see films listed under their original titles regardless of your login status or site preferences.

Don't forget that if you are accessing IMDB through the search engines, then in the second case you will have to change the URL manual all the time, but not in the first one.

Answer 4

I guess http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?titlelanguagedisplay might be what you are looking for.

We recently modified the way titles are displayed on the site. Users will now by default see titles listed in the language used for release in their country (i.e. US-based users will see films listed under the title used for the North American release, while users browsing the site from France will see titles as they appeared on the French release of those movies etc.)

If you are registered on IMDb.com and you prefer to see original titles, or the title in any other language/country of release by default, you can set your user preferences accordingly.

To do this, please click on the 'Your Account' link (located in the upper right corner of every page on IMDb.com) and then click on the 'Site Preferences' option, or go directly to https://secure.imdb.com/register-imdb/siteprefs , and then choose the desired options from the "Title Display Country" and "Title Display Language" dropdown menus. Click 'OK' to save your choice.

For more help/information, please refer to our site preferences help page.

Please also remember that if you access the site through the following URL, you will always see films listed under their original titles regardless of your login status or site preferences:

http://akas.imdb.com

Answer 5

IMDB currently uses Accept-Language header to detect the browser language.

In case you need to do it anyway, the workaround will be similar to the X-FORWARDED-FOR header modification, which can be accomplished with one of the most popular extensions:

ModHeader for Chrome:

• Choose the request header Accept-Language and set the value as en-US, or your preferred language ISO code;
• Click the + button in ModHeader while you're on the IMDB page so that the filter ends up being https:\/\/www.imdb.com.

HTTP Header Mangler for Firefox:

• After installing the extension, go to Firefox Add-ons Manager, or type about:addons in the address bar;
• Select HTTP Header Mangler, access the Options tab, and in the text box paste the desired header request override, like in the example below:

https:\/\/www.imdb.com
Accept-Language=en-US

Answer 6

If any one wants to use jsoup (HTML parser) in Java, it's like this:

Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://www.imdb.com/chart/top").header("Accept-Language", "en").get();
Elements elems = doc.select("td.titleColumn");
for (Element e : elems)
{
    // Do Something
}

Answer 7

If you are using Chrome, go to http://akas.imdb.com/ and do a search within the site—anything, it doesn't matter.

Once you've done a search, right-click in the location/address bar and select “Edit Search Engines…”.

Scroll to find the IMDb search—you'll find that it has created a search URL, and replace the search term in the URL with %s. Change the middle of the table (the “keyword”) to imdb (and make sure that the URL begins with akas, not www. Save it.

Now, to search IMDd directly, just type “imdb your search here” into the address bar and it will search IMDb directly.