/pvr-inox-radar

pvr-inox-radar

Turn a movie-night ask into one HTML map of PVR INOX shows, with verified seats-together counts for the shortlist and a deep link into PVR's own booking page on every chip.

Iron rules first

• Politeness. The client enforces a minimum 0.6s gap between API calls, strictly sequential. A 403 or 429 means the upstream blocked us: STOP the whole run, tell the user, never retry in the same turn (the cooldown is 15 minutes and persists across processes). Never hit the API in parallel. Seat maps are fetched only for the top shortlisted shows, never in bulk.
• Read-only. Never book, hold, or poll. The user buys tickets themselves on pvrcinemas.com; every show links straight into PVR's seat page.
• Credit. Client engineering adapted from notprashanth/pvr-inox-mcp (MIT); see LICENSE. Never claim this project discovered the API.

Parse the query

Extract from the user's ask:

• Film: title substring ("Dune"). Optional; omit to list everything.
• Format: IMAX, 4DX, ATMOS, LASER, GOLD, INSIGNIA, PLAYHOUSE, DIRECTOR'S CUT, ICE. Optional.
• Date: run date first, then resolve weekday words to YYYY-MM-DD in IST ("Saturday" means the coming Saturday in IST, not local time).
• Time window: evening = 18:00 to 23:59, night = 20:00 onward, matinee = before 17:00. Pass as --time-from / --time-to (24h IST). Relative asks ("starting in the next 30 to 90 minutes", "something we can leave for now") are computed from date in IST: now+30min to now+90min, rounded to minutes.
• Party size: "4 seats together" means --party-size 4.
• Seat tier: "recliners", "recliner seats", "loungers" means --tier recliner (or the asked word). This counts seats only inside matching priced rows (mixed halls name them, e.g. RECLINER ROWS) and counts whole halls only for recliner-native houses (Director's Cut, INSIGNIA, LUXE, Gold). For tier asks also pass --seat-detail 6 or more: a mixed hall's recliners are invisible until its seat map is opened, and the map honestly drops verified halls that have no such tier (meta.excluded_by_tier says how many).
• Price: "under Rs 500" means --max-price 500; "cheapest" means --sort cheapest. Prices live ONLY inside seat maps (show listings carry none), so pass --seat-detail 8 for price asks and say that unverified shows carry no price rather than a guessed one. The map's Price column shows "from Rs N": the matched tier's per-ticket gross, or the hall's cheapest tier (convenience fee and GST are extra at checkout).
• Origin: a locality ("Sector 56 Gurgaon") or a bare city ("Gurugram"). After resolving it (geocode or city centre), STATE the resolved place and coordinates in one line before running ("Using Sector 56, Gurugram at 28.44, 77.06; say so if that is wrong") so the user can correct the location. The map labels this origin as "You: <label>"; if the user corrects it, geocode the new place and re-run.
• City: usually implied by the locality. If genuinely ambiguous, restate the task in one line and ask ONE question instead of guessing.

When to geocode

Only when the user names a locality finer than a city. Run once and reuse:

python3 scripts/geocode.py "Sector 56, Gurugram"

It prints one JSON object: {"lat": ..., "lng": ..., "display_name": ..., "source": "nominatim", "cached": true|false} (cached; at most 1 Nominatim request per second). A bare city name skips geocoding entirely: radar.py resolves city-centre coordinates itself. Never geocode in a loop.

Run the radar

python3 scripts/radar.py --city Gurugram --lat 28.42 --lng 77.09 \
  --origin-label "Sector 56 Gurgaon" --origin-source geocode \
  --movie "Dune" --format IMAX --date 2026-08-22 \
  --time-from 18:00 --party-size 4 --seat-detail 4 > radar.json

Flag guidance:

• --lat/--lng plus --origin-label/--origin-source: pass the geocoded coordinates and label; omit all four for a bare city (city centre is used). --origin-source takes exactly two values: "geocode" when the coordinates came from geocode.py, "caller" (the default) when the user supplied coordinates directly.
• --max-km: defaults to 6 km with caller coordinates and no format, else 60 km (a premium format is a city-level resource). Widen it when the user says "anywhere in the city" or results are thin.
• --seat-detail N: seat maps are fetched for the top N shows only (default 3, cap 8, 0 disables). Raise it when the user cares a lot about exact seats; every increment is one more paced API call.
• Expect the run to take about 15 to 25 seconds on cold caches: calls are deliberately spaced 0.6s apart and real network latency adds on top. That is the politeness budget, not a bug.
• Exit codes: 0 = answer (including partial and closed-date answers), 2 = usage (bad flags, a city PVR does not serve, or a city with no published coordinates: pass --lat and --lng), 3 = blocked before any results, 4 = unexpected (including call-ceiling exhaustion before any results existed). Stdout is always one JSON document; logs go to stderr.

Render and open

python3 scripts/render_map.py --in radar.json --out map.html

Open map.html in the user's browser. Also give a compact ranked summary in chat (top 3 to 5 shows: venue, time, format, seats-together verdict, drive estimate, deep link) so the answer survives without the map.

Name the output per query so maps do not clobber each other: map-<movie-or-all>-<date>.html (e.g. map-awarapan-2026-08-21.html). One HTML answers one QUERY: an all-films ask is one map holding every film; a movie ask is one map for that film.

Ratings (fetch by DEFAULT for any ask that names a film, and for the top 3 to 5 films of an all-films ask; skip only if the user says skip): the scripts never fetch ratings and need no API key; YOU look them up. After the radar run, take the distinct film titles from radar.json, look up each rating with your own web search (IMDb preferred; say the source you actually found; third-party mirrors misreport, prefer imdb.com itself), then render with them; rated films appear as a strip under the stats and as a table column:

python3 scripts/render_map.py --in radar.json --out map.html \
  --ratings '{"AWARAPAN 2 (HINDI)": {"rating": "7.2", "source": "IMDb"}}'

Keys match film names case-insensitively. Tell the user ratings were looked up by you at ask time and are approximate; never invent one, and skip the flag entirely for films you could not verify.

Present honestly

• Verified seat counts and unverified status labels are different things; label them differently, as the map does. Never present an unverified show as bookable-for-N.
• "Closed" means the date is not on sale yet (PVR sells a rolling window of about 5 days). It never means sold out; say so.
• Drive times are estimates (heuristic, or one OSRM table call); say "est.".
• Availability labels can lag in both directions; counted seats are exact at fetch time.
• A withheld seat is indistinguishable from a sold one without seat history. Free counts are a floor, not a ceiling.

Handling trouble

• Blocked (exit 3 or meta.error UPSTREAM_BLOCKED): stop, tell the user PVR's edge is rate-limiting and to retry after about 15 minutes. Present any partial results, labeled partial. Never retry in the same turn.
• Closed date (meta.booking_open false): explain the rolling ~5 day window and offer to run an open date instead.
• Mixed open and closed venues: when results are empty or thin but meta.booking_open is still true, check venues[].booking_open and the meta.cinemas_queried outcomes before concluding "no shows": some venues may simply not be on sale yet for that date (outcome "closed", which is never sold out). Say which venues are open with no match and which are not selling yet; that distinction is the point of this tool.
• Empty results: relax in this order: set --seat-detail to 0 (see more, verify less), widen --max-km, widen the time window. Never silently drop the film or the format; ask before changing what the user asked for.

Do not

• Book tickets, hold seats, or automate any purchase step.
• Poll, watch, or loop on availability.
• Hit the API in parallel or below the 0.6s spacing.
• Call content/cinemasessions (known-broken endpoint; the client never does).
• Guess what an unmapped status color means; say "unknown".
• Claim we discovered the API or the row-release behavior.