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Show HN: movies.io — torrent search like it should be
- xal 14y agoI want this except with paying to get an actual license.
- nddrylliog 14y agoWe really want, too. We'll try to make it happen. In the meantime, don't dl movies you don't own. Oh, and the watchlist functionality is pretty cool too.
- citricsquid 14y agoHow do you plan on staying online?
- nddrylliog 14y ago- Not based in the US: check - Not hosting any infringing content: check - DMCA-compliant: check - Not selling anything: check - Not doing ads, not tracking you [1]: check - Not trying to sell your data elsewhere: check Lawyers will handle the rest. We're not interested in piracy, just very very good UI/UX. Stay tuned. [1] We use Gaug.es and Piwik with IP fuzzing. They provide enough high-level metrics so that we can improve the interface while letting you guys off the hook.
- kcbanner 14y ago...but it's called movies.io.
- nddrylliog 14y agoSo? movies are illegal now? Make watchlists! Share them with your friends. Nobody's telling you to download films you don't own.
- b2hack 14y agoI liked the very very good UI/UX, good job! What are the technologies involved ?
- nddrylliog 14y agoIt's a typical Rails 3 apps, Nokogiri used for scraping, PostgreSQL db (migrated from SQLite originally), jQuery+ui for the aucomplete (lazy, yay!), and that's about it :)
- rjernigan 14y agoIf you don't mind me asking...where (and maybe how) are you pulling the super high quality images for each movie page background?
- nddrylliog 14y agoThe http://www.themoviedb.org/ http://www.themoviedb.org/ are doing an amazing job. Using their V3 API right now, it's very nicely designed.
- daviday 14y agoImpressive. Your autocomplete suggestions are high quality, even in foreign languages. May I ask how you are ranking suggestions results? It can't simply be the TMDB api, right?
- nddrylliog 14y agoRight now our search/suggestions is a direct API request to TMDb. Yes, they are that good (props to Fanhattan). Re: foreign languages, they store very tidy information about all the available titles (basically a mapping from ISO 3166-1 to the title), cf. http://help.themoviedb.org/kb/api/movie-alternative-titles http://help.themoviedb.org/kb/api/movie-alternative-titles Thanks for the feedback!
- Kudos 14y agoVastly superior UX at http://torrentbutler.eu/ http://torrentbutler.eu/
- nddrylliog 14y agoJust heard of torrentbutler a few hours ago. It's interesting, and gets a few things right, but it's not what we're going for. Hopefully the minimalist side of movies.io attracts a different kind of people. Also, the whole watchlist+sharing aspect is missing in tb.
- collisioncode 14y agoIf you added TV shows it would be better. Finding movies isn't hard, finding episodes of TV shows is tedious and error prone.
- nddrylliog 14y agocf. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4054800 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4054800, and you're absolutely right. We're working on reduce pain points, TV shows is an even more interesting challenge.
- Kudos 14y agoThere's minimalist, and there's functionally incomplete. Right now you guys are the latter as a torrent service, whereas TB are not.
- bengl 14y agoI'm confused. If you're not located in the US, why do you need to be DMCA-compliant?
- jsprinkles 14y agoWhy create yet more problems for yourself?
- okamiueru 14y agoThe extradition of the British kid who only linked to external content, and the extradition attempt of Kim Dotcom makes you wonder.
- white_devil 14y ago> Not doing ads, tracking you, trying to sell your data elsewhere: check With the absence of a "not" there, it's not quite clear whether you're telling the truth or not, but a http request to "track.gif" could be construed as, you know, tracking us. http://secure.gaug.es/track.gif?h[site_id]=4fb448ea613f5d5be100000e&h[resource]=http%3A%2F%2Fmovies.io%2Fm%2F1m&h[referrer]=http%3A%2F%2Fmovies.io%2Fi%2Ftop50&h[title]=Project%20X%20(2012)%20%7C%20movies.io&h[user_agent]=Mozilla%2F5.0%20(Macintosh%3B%20Intel%20Mac%20OS%20X%2010.6%3B%20rv%3A12.0)%20Gecko%2F20100101%20Firefox%2F12.0&h[unique]=0&h[unique_hour]=0&h[unique_day]=0&h[unique_month]=0&h[unique_year]=0&h[screenx]=1920&h[browserx]=1920&h[browsery]=594×tamp=1338576974951 http://secure.gaug.es/track.gif?h[site_id]=4fb448ea613f5d5be... > We're not interested in piracy Sure you are. You're directly helping people perform it. I'm not saying what you're doing should be illegal, but let's be honest here. You are "interested" in piracy. One could argue you're even involved in it.
- nddrylliog 14y ago> With the absence of a "not" there, it's not quite clear whether you're telling the truth or not, but a http request to "track.gif" could be construed as, you know, tracking us. Fair point, reworded the above to be more precise. Point taken.
- nddrylliog 14y agoWanted to clarify on: > Sure you are. You're directly helping people perform it. I'm not saying what you're doing should be illegal, but let's be honest here. You are "interested" in piracy. One could argue you're even involved in it. To be, again, completely honest with you, no. If you could have that much exposure showing photos of shoes, we'd do it instead. I see it as... a start-up without the worry to make profit. We use analytics only to improve the product. We use this as a product building exercise, that's all. We don't upload movies, we don't run a tracker, we don't belong to any release groups: that's how not interested in piracy we are.
- biot 14y ago> We don't upload movies, we don't run a tracker, we don't belong to > any release groups: that's how not interested in piracy we are. That's like saying "We don't sell crystal meth, we're not distributors for crystal meth, we don't belong to any drug production groups, but our site helps kids obtain crystal meth from those who do: that's how not interested in crystal meth we are."
- mahyarm 14y agoHow are the movie screenshots and posters not infringing content?
- quinndupont 14y agoSuddenly we live in a world where you need to go to a rights holder to reference an image for discussion or non-profit display? The law may be divided on the issue, but I'm not.
- saraid216 14y agoWhat do you mean by "the law [is] divided on the issue"? As far as I know, this is very clear-cut in the law.
- lucaspiller 14y agoWhat is your revenue model, how do you plan on paying said layers?
- nddrylliog 14y agoVery good friends, (less controversial) start-ups, that's about it. movies.io is just a hobby.
- kurtvarner 14y agoI've always wondered why all torrent sites look like ass. Nice job with this.
- rplnt 14y agoIt's tracker sites that often look like ass.
- jsprinkles 14y agoGazelle is awful, and far too many private trackers use it.
- tbeseda 14y agoGazelle really is bad. Is there an alternative? Maybe Ruby or Python?
- phos 14y agoThere are different projects in the works by different trackers. Check back in a few months.
- danberger 14y agowhat's so awful about it?
- arrakeen 14y agoonce upon a time, I thought it might be fun to hack on the gazelle project and give back to the community. so I grabbed the source from svn, opened one file, and promptly rm -fr'd. I have nothing against the UX of gazelle, but the code is very, very bad PHP
- phos 14y ago- Custom wrapper around MySQLi, which doesn't support parametrized queries - No separation of Model, View and Controller (in 10 lines, there's SQL, HTML, JS, PHP and if you get lucky, PHP generating JS or piecing together HTML) - Their idea of IRC integration is to write a bot in PHP, where different pages send it raw IRC commands to execute - is_numeric used for most SQL injection checks - User information stored in two tables (users_main, users_info), for no apparent reason - About 1/3 of the code is in a file named script_start.php, which defines a mess of global variables and functions - They store PHP-serialized data in MySQL TEXT fields - They store pipe-separated data in MySQL TEXT fields I could go on, but you get the idea.
- mikemarotti 14y agoI sure as hell ain't downloading any movies from mystery trackers.
- nddrylliog 14y agoLook again: there are only magnet links on there. Trust the DHT :)
- ben0x539 14y agoAs someone not too familiar with p2p technologies: What difference does that make for the user?
- nddrylliog 14y agoI love to teach! Here's a small run-down: Previously, .torrent files were the preferred method to distribute torrents. They contain meta-data such as the size of the torrent, its name, whether it's a single file or a folder, the file structure, and more importantly, a list of trackers (think of them as "matchmakers" for people who participate in the torrent) and SHA-1 hashes of all blocks of the torrents. However, recently, magnet links seem to be preferred: instead of sending all the info above, you just send the SHA-1 hash (20 bytes) of the torrent. (We add in some extra stuff, such as the torrent's name and size so it displays faster in torrent clients). From that hash, torrent clients will join the Distributed Hash Table ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table ) and ask around if anyone has seen this torrent. If yes, the content of the .torrent file is transmitted directly from peer to peer, and you can start downloading it like a regular torrent. It's a very neat trick, and it allowed bringing down the size of ThePirateBay to 90MB total: http://infworm.com/fit-the-entire-pirate-bay-site-on-a-usb-drive http://infworm.com/fit-the-entire-pirate-bay-site-on-a-usb-d...
- tbeseda 14y agoMagnet links are great for trackers dodging liability, but the risk to the user is still the same, correct? The RIAA and MPAA can still monitor connected peers. I think Mike might be making more of a reference to non-private trackers. I wish I had your great interface for trusted communities I'm a member of...
- trueluk 14y agoWarning to those at work, there's at least one NSFW image in rotation on the landing page.
- nddrylliog 14y agoYup, sorry about that. The NSFW filter is off on our TMDb requests but apparently some go through regardless. The rotation is random from all movies in the db btw, not featured or anything.
- saraid216 14y agoIf you just run the randomizer and get the first unique 100 or 200 and cull for NSFW, the effect would be the same without the peril.
- nddrylliog 14y agoThat's the thing though: we have 0 movies marked as NSFW from TMDB in our database. We'd have to have a 'Report as NSFW' link somewhere to achieve that, and that seems easy to abuse.
- trueluk 14y agoIt was the first backdrop for Ali G Indahouse (http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/9298-ali-g-indahouse http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/9298-ali-g-indahouse).
- saraid216 14y agoWhat I meant is that you pull 100-200 out and go through them yourself, manually. Take a look at 15 or so a day and you'd be done in a week or two. Spread them out amongst the team and it'd take less time.
- nddrylliog 14y agoSounds like a good idea, we'll try to find some time to do that. In the meantime, we've added a few restrictions as to which movies can be featured: they must have an artwork at TMDb, and a rating of over 5/10.
- espadagroup 14y agoNice job, the first thing I would like to see is a tag for CAMS and TeleSyncs.
- nddrylliog 14y agoThanks for the feedback! The initial version had a lot more tags, but we've learned that lambda users even go so far as to ignore what 720p/1080p means. It's a nice UI/UX challenge to accomodate for both beginners and power users. We have a few power users in our ranks and since we scratch an itch we'd definitely like to address our own needs as well. Consider this version an MVP, good enough for most people.
- phoboslab 14y agoIt certainly looks nice, but it's not really accurate. E.g. the page for Moon links to Twilight torrents: http://movies.io/m/9t http://movies.io/m/9t
- nddrylliog 14y agoOur algorithm tries to things: to flag the bad torrents so they're not displayed, and to not penalize the rare torrents you get for old/unpopular movies. Moon has bad results because the title is only one word, and Twilight's sorry excuse for a movie happens to be the same year. We'll definitely look to improve that, thanks for the feedback.
- joejohnson 14y agoWhen you click on the Genre labels (like on the Moon page, for example), they don't take you anywhere. Is this feature in the works? I was expecting to be taken to a page listing all Thrillers or Dramas. The Genre titles look like links, too.
- nddrylliog 14y agoDefinitely in the works.
- user24 14y agoHijacking the thread to ask you a question: How do you do acquire the background image? That just blew my mind, it's an awesome feature. Do you have to pre-associate each film with an image, or.... ? Details please! In fact, I'd read a blog post about the frontend tech, the backend tech and the general UI philosophy. It's an awesome site.
- nddrylliog 14y agoSo, I'll take the time to set up our website blog, and then I'll let you check back for it :) We'll communicate about our work on the site. We use GitHub a lot to manage issues / collaboration within devs, it's an awesome tool.
- seanieb 14y agohttp://torrentbutler.eu/ http://torrentbutler.eu/ seems to have a better UI.
- wingerlang 14y agoCame here to say this. I love the wall of movies, no need for searching.
- rplnt 14y agoI miss the time when torrentz.com (now https://torrentz.eu/ https://torrentz.eu/ ) used to have magnet links. Now I have to click through to piratebay (or worse). Although I don't plan on using this, nice job. One point - I don't think you should move the search bar around. It would be better if it was in the same place all the time, whether there are results or not.
- nddrylliog 14y agoFair point about the search bar, we'll try to think of it in the redesign. Do you have any idea why torrentz pulled magnet links? Seems insane that linking to sites with .torrent files is easier to defend (legally) than having directly magnet links.
- rplnt 14y agoMaybe someone got scared? I don't know.. but my guess would be a better CTR on sponsored links that are shown alongside trackers.
- nddrylliog 14y agoAh, fair point. The Torrentz guy seems paranoid indeed (lots of disclaimers everywhere) but that seems to serve him well, it's been online for 8 years. Also, hamsters! http://torrentz.eu/img/hamster.jpg http://torrentz.eu/img/hamster.jpg
- petitmiam 14y agorplnt, you should try using a magnet link extension (or greasemonkey script) for your browser. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dmknbldjfdgmfecaaiapjfcpofncdlmh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dmknbldjfdgmfecaai...
- stfu 14y agoAt least in Opera the search function is not really working. Neither pressing Enter no clicking on the magnifying glass does the trick.
- nddrylliog 14y agoReported, we don't really test on Opera, but we should. (Do you have JavaScript disabled btw? That could be it: the magnifying glass doesn't do anything except change to a loading icon when it's fetching suggestions)
- fbuilesv 14y agoSame thing happens sporadically in Chrome too.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jack-r-abbit 14y agowhat? HN submission is still alive for me. Or are you talking about something else?
- nddrylliog 14y agoAh, disappeared from the frontpage for a solid 5 minutes. Back on now!
- ecaroth 14y agoNICE! It would be nice if I knew the rip quality of the trackers though, I'm not gonna blindly download a crappy telesync without knowing
- nddrylliog 14y agoHover over the 'download' link and you'll see the full release name :)
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoOh nice tip.
- Bootvis 14y agoBut still not great from a UX perspective. It would definitely be a plus if this is added. Some method to let other users curate the content would be great too. On the TPB this can be done at looking at the colored skull or the comments. Improving on this method would be great. I don't know whether linking to a release site is practical and desirable? EDIT: also order by date. If I type hunger, hunger games should be on top.
- nddrylliog 14y agoOrdering by date is a good idea, although maybe unpractical? ('relevance' is the criterion right now). And, agreed, relying on tooltips for critical info is not good. But, again: how do you separate beginners (who would be confused by the release name) and seasoned users (who are pissed that it's not there by default) ? Linking to a release site would be over the line. There's a lot to do for user-curated content, watchlists are a first step, but we're going to go a lot further. We just have to think carefully about it: just enabling comments would result in a whole lot of garbage. We'll try to do something smart instead.
- Bootvis 14y ago
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoI like the UI and the execution. I don't know why it is limited to movies. The UI could easily be used for music too.
- nestlequ1k 14y agoFocus is a good thing. Having it just be movies means he can make a much richer experience.
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoTrue. But sometimes I like the "one stop shopping" things. When I want to look for a torrent, I go to my "go to" site regardless of what type of thing I'm looking for. I would love to see a UI like this that scaled to other stuff.
- nddrylliog 14y agoAgain, planned for later. We are (obviously) still refining our copy with movies.io, but when we're happy with it, there's still a lot on the plate: responsive design, releasing an API, mobile apps. RSS feeds are a killer feature: add a movie on your iPhone, it's downloaded when you go back home. Once we have the "final" look of the website, we can apply the same design elements to finding TV Shows, etc. The sky's the limit, really. Oh, and one account for everything, of course.
- trienthusiast 14y agoHi. http://www.consoleshop.nl/ http://www.consoleshop.nl/ is a dutch online console store. Good design but nothing amazing. But if you just click on another tab (ie http://www.homecinemacenter.nl/ http://www.homecinemacenter.nl/) you switch to a totally different store but you barely realize it. Shopping cart is in common.
- nddrylliog 14y agoWe bought http://shows.io/ http://shows.io/, which is the logical next step for us. Music is a lot trickier, I don't think we're going to attack it. As for 'why it's limited': gotta focus on one thing at a time. We want to improve this one as much as possible, serve the community, improve content discovery/suggestion (that is personalized from your friends, not from some oracle rating stuff from 1 to 10)
- denzil_correa 14y agoA lot of torrent movie downloaders check for the "type of" print available - CamRip, Blue Ray RIP, DV RIP etc. It would be great if you could display these after the search goes through. It would make the movie download decision 1-click.
- nddrylliog 14y agocf. http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4054667 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4054667 Displaying by default would confuse lambda users. How would you solve it UX-wise?
- Terretta 14y agoI notice you are trying to display quality, like HD1080 on this movie[1]. But doesn't this HD1080 label seem a little inconsistent with the file size? 1. http://movies.io/m/37 http://movies.io/m/37 Another example[2], variously tagged HD720 and HD1080, with the latter clearly wrong. 2. http://movies.io/m/4o http://movies.io/m/4o
- nddrylliog 14y agoDefinitely: some results are wrong. We're working from text data, so it's kinda inaccurate sometimes. We plan to develop our own crawler (instead of relying on other search engines), and refine our heuristics for tags / flagging false torrents.
- Estragon 14y agoWhere does this term "lambda users" come from?
- DuoSRX 14y ago"Lambda" is often used in french as an adjective for "average", "ordinary" or "typical".
- 14y ago
- CyberThijs 14y agoI'd like to be able to set a minimum quality for torrents that appear in the RSS of my watchlist. This allows me to add it to the watchlist when it's widely promoted when it launches, and watch it when eventually a good torrent appears of the movie. I've been looking for an aggregator that does this for a long time, but still haven't found it.
- nddrylliog 14y agoDefinitely, definitely, very strongly on our TODO list. Consider this a first step :)
- sboak 14y agoIt needs to be able to distinguish the different types (DVDRIP, TS, etc...)
- Tmmrn 14y agoNot working in konqueror and midori. In opera I had to hit enter twice - but only once, then it worked normally. Background images that are even bigger than 700 KB and every single click on a link has a new one? Is that really necessary? While the search is all nice and stuff, what about browsing available stuff? Is that an intentionally lacking feature because you say "please don't download content that you haven't bought" anyway?
- nddrylliog 14y agoKonqueror and Midori are not on our radar (although we know of them). We'll try to keep them in mind also admittedly that's not priority #1. About backgrounds: the randomness is part of what attracts people to the website (bored? just reload N times). That said, for logged on users, there could be an option 'disable random background' or something like that. Why is page size a problem btw? Are you browsing on mobile? We'll have a mobile-friendly website without random backgrounds. As for browsing available stuff: there's top50, and you can share public watchlists. For other queries such as Year/Genre, etc. you're better served with a search on IMDb or similar and then come back to movies.io. It takes time to do it right and we didn't want to release something half-assed. We'll look a lot more into recommending content (from your 'peers'), there's a whole social aspect of the website which isn't there yet (mostly because some people don't care about it, and just want a search engine).
- Tmmrn 14y agoNot all people have fast internet connections. Seeing a background image loading 2+ seconds just isn't a good impression. There are file specific things where imdb wouldn't help me: What if I want to browse all 720p or better h.264 science fiction movies with a german audio track? Stuff like that.
- nddrylliog 14y agoSo, a user setting would work then?
- notaddicted 14y agoPretty. I searched for the film 8 1/2 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056801/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056801/) Two things: 1. The director's first name is wrong. 2. No results (maybe due to the ½ symbol.) EDIT: here http://movies.io/m/fI http://movies.io/m/fI
- nddrylliog 14y agoEntirely agree, I suggest you edit the TMDb entry to make it better :) http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/422 http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/422 We don't yet update our stuff from TMDb once cached, but will do soon.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoBUG: - Resource interpreted as Font but transferred with MIME type text/plain: "http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Reg-webfont-6690edfe4c4ab548613491ba6f916cd2.woff http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Reg-webfont-6690edfe4c4ab548613... - Resource interpreted as Font but transferred with MIME type text/plain: "http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Lig-webfont-653131606c56b81c0ae5a882a781ce74.woff http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Lig-webfont-653131606c56b81c0ae... (Safari 5.2 beta, OS X Lion 10.7.3, though that is clearly irrelevant!)
- nddrylliog 14y agoAw fuck, missing mime-type in the nginx config. I clearly suck at sysadmining.
- hristov 14y agoHow do you choose the splash screen for the different movies? It seems that for each movie I tried you have a very good screen-cap that is obviously not something random, and yet it is also not the official poster. Did someone select these screens by hand?
- hhimanshu 14y agois it legal to download movies from these torrents? I believe no, correct me if I am wrong http://techland.time.com/2011/08/30/expendables-piracy-lawsuit-dropped-for-now/ http://techland.time.com/2011/08/30/expendables-piracy-lawsu...
- smartendone 14y agoNo, it's not legal. But only non-MPAA-affiliated films are the subject of torrent lawsuits. The MPAA gave up that tactic a while ago. Movies like The Expendables and The Hurt Locker aren't MPAA-affiliated. Those lawsuits are being pushed by independent lawyers trying to get rich quick through mass settlements. Of course, that doesn't prevent them from suing in the future.
- nddrylliog 14y agoAlso, legislation differs depending on the country you live. Get informed!
- pooriaazimi 14y agoFeature request: The background images look very nice. I'd like to be able to easily hide all the text and just view the background (But, please don't 1) dim the text - completely hide it, 2) use one of those stupid LightBox thingies)
- nddrylliog 14y agoWe hate lightbox as much as you do. No, more! Yes, the backdrops are awesome (thank the amazing guys at http://www.themoviedb.org/ http://www.themoviedb.org/ !), we'd like to find a cool way to let you show them without crowding the interface.
- wavephorm 14y agoTmdb and their API is awesome. But I wish they would provide a dump of their database. I wonder how did you get a copy of all their data, did you build scraper and grab every movie?
- pooriaazimi 14y agoApparently they're using an scraper. See his/her other comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755
- nddrylliog 14y agoThe TMDb API v3 is good. We're scraping Torrentz for the results, might do our own indexing later. Oh, and "his".
- darkstalker 14y agoright click on background -> show background image
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rsingel 14y agoThat's mighty purty. Bug: if you try to type in something that doesn't exist, say an actor's name like Walter Matthau, it autocorrects so aggressively you can't finish typing Feature requests: If it's available on Netflix/other streaming services, show a link. Oh, and this seems like a very bad place to actually log-in.
- tensafefrogs 14y agoAccording to the Netflix terms for their affiliate program[1], they won't let you participate in their program if your site includes "illegal activities." Seems understandable, but maybe if they allowed torrent sites to direct users to them they could help prevent some piracy AND everyone would make some money. [1] https://signup.netflix.com/Affiliates https://signup.netflix.com/Affiliates
- nddrylliog 14y agoYup, that seems to be a stupid policy. Anyway, linking to Netflix/others is nice in theory but clutters the interface. Until we find a good solution for that, we won't do it.
- zanny 14y agoIt is a defensive posture against the mafia. Netflix is already bent over backwards as movie distributors try to run it into the ground with overt contracts, so they force them to use policies like these because they have the backwards idea that sharing will go away when they put their fingers in their ears and go lalalalala you don't exist.
- nddrylliog 14y agoOh, yes, I can definitely guess the thinking behind it, I'm just saying this thinking is antiquated and doesn't work well in 2012.
- veridies 14y agoBut if you offer a link to any Watch Instantly-available film in the same frame as the torrent links, I think that would be great. Same with Amazon's and YouTube's streaming movie offerings.
- edw519 14y agoI don't know which I feel saddest about: 1. Whether or not this is actually illegal, it is clearly unethical and not in the spirit of good clean business and technology practices we should all be aspire to. 2. That it quickly made it to #1 on Hacker News. 3. That I seem to be one of the few who cares while most others nit on details.
- spinlock 14y agoJobs and Wozniak started by building freaking boxes.
- there 14y ago"phreaking"
- EricR23 14y agoAhem. That's "phreaking"... As in phone phreaking. -- coming from an ex-phone phreak ;)
- pixelbath 14y agoUnless he's talking about the first Apple computer, in which case, they were literally building "freaking boxes."
- sgricci 14y agoI believe you mean "phreaking" boxes.
- railsjedi 14y agofriggin phreaking boxes ;)
- JoachimSchipper 14y agoWait, what Steve Jobs does determines your morality? He was obviously a great CEO, but not exactly a saint...
- 14y ago
- silentscope 14y agoyou incite the wrath of the gods. hope you know a lawyer.
- nddrylliog 14y agoSeveral!
- notatoad 14y agoit's pretty, but it's a worse experience than legal alternatives like netflix because you have to take the gamble deciding which copy to download. I value piracy for pushing the user experience forward (without the competition it provides, i doubt we would have netflix instant streaming now), but nothing here seems different than anything before it, just prettier.
- nddrylliog 14y agoThe first result should be reasonably good. We're working on that to improve the algorithms and find the best possible torrent.
- sandropadin 14y agoLooks nice. There seems to be a bug with the movie titles though. I clicked the top 50 and most of the torrent links for the movie Safe were actually for the movie Safe House.
- TheShadowFog 14y agoFeature request: Let us search Actors/Actress's names and come up with movies they played in?
- Dirlewanger 14y agoVery nice. Very slick. A little too slick though for my tastes concerning movie torrents. I'd like to have some info on A/V codecs, bitrate, etc. before I even think of downloading.
- nddrylliog 14y agoUnderstood. Real power users aren't well served by the current version. We might go further in that direction, but we'll weigh our legal options first.
- radley 14y agoNeeds better search logic & display results. Clicked on #2 "Safe" and 4 out of 5 were for "Safe House".
- nddrylliog 14y agoYup, short film names currently give not-so-good torrent results. One guy in the team is working on much better algorithms for the following: - Torrent ranking for a given movie - Better heuristic to detect the quality of release, language, and 'advanced' tags: there's a lot you can guess from the release name without having to download/cache the files yourself. - Movie recommendation (stuff like "3 of your friends want to watch the same kind of movies, why not watch them together?") - Hell, who knows, matchmaking? "You and X would probably get along well, since you're both hardcore Tarantino fans" In any way, clean design is not the only way we try to differenciate ourselves.
- hardik988 14y agoI'm not too familiar with the inner workings of P2P technologies of torrent and magnets, but is "snooping" possible with magnet downloads ? Like in the case of torrents, MPAA often hops on to a tracker, doesn't send/receive any data, but all it does is log the public IPs of all peers on the tracker. Is this a problem with magnet downloads as well ?
- nddrylliog 14y agoDefinitely. See http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4055215 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4055215. Magnet links don't protect you, they're just a simple and standard way to refer to a torrent. Thankfully, an IP address can't identify a person: http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-cant-even-identify-a-state-bittorrent-judge-rules-120515/ http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-cant-even-identify-a-stat...
- larholm 14y agoMagnet links are just a shortcut for getting the .torrent file, everything else still applies.
- dclaysmith 14y agoI'd like to hear some talk about how the post went to the frontpage very quickly, generated some very interesting comments and then got buried (atleast temporarily)? Was this a result of people flagging the post due to the (some would argue) unethical function of the site?
- nddrylliog 14y agoif you hear more about this, let me know: I'm as curious as you.
- lbo 14y agoI built a somewhat similar product http://www.dexy.tv http://www.dexy.tv but it only links to 'legit' content (netflix, hulu, amazon, etc). nddrylliog, send me an email if you're interested in potentially collaborating so you can list both kinds of content. Really like what you've done on the UI side.
- cpeterso 14y agoDo any torrent sites have affiliate links to legit content like Amazon? That seems like a good opportunity. If someone searches for a movie torrent, the movie might be available on Amazon (DVD or streaming) even if no torrents are found. And, more interestingly, someone might search for a movie torrent but see they can stream it from Amazon right now for just $5 without waiting for a torrent download.
- stevengg 14y agoyou should add collections like can be found on whatcd and passthepopcorn[1] that users can link to and search [1] http://i.imgur.com/PXFRE.jpg http://i.imgur.com/PXFRE.jpg
- nddrylliog 14y agoActually, we have our own watchlists, but they seem to be inferior in features to what you can find on whatcd/ptpc. We'll keep working on that. Thanks for the tip!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rdegges 14y agoThis is beautiful. Thanks! <3
- guynamedloren 14y agoYES! Thank you! I have been thinking about building this forever, but have never actually implemented it due to the fuzzy legal issues (read: it's totally illegal) and imminent shut down. Love the interface. Love the simplicity. Love the graphics. Love the lack of [unnecessary] technical details and inclusion of details about the actual movie (rating, genre, summary, cover photo, etc). Only thing I can think of to improve this is including a trailer on the download page. Yeah, IMDB is linked and that has trailers, but not quite as cool :) Also, related movies would be awesome.
- calloc 14y agoThere is nothing illegal about this. It provides magnet links, so it is not even linking to the files themselves, they aren't hosting infringing content...
- guynamedloren 14y agoI wish you were right, but I don't think Johnny Law agrees with you.
- proksoup 14y agoBetter trailers yes. Like maybe youtube search for movie_title + ' trailer' and embed the top result...
- nddrylliog 14y agoTMDb link to some trailers, but the quality is quite poor. We want a good solution or none at all.
- guynamedloren 14y agoWhy not youtube? Against their terms?
- nddrylliog 14y ago
- guard-of-terra 14y agoWhy? torrentz.eu is more generic and works better on fuzzy searches. And I don't care that you parsed wikipedia. I've tried searching for some anime and it's not pretty, suggest offers you some transliterated or authentic japan which is confusing.
- nddrylliog 14y agoWe're not good at niches (japanese movies, etc.), yet! But we're working on better international support: Japanese, German, Italian, French movies have often confusing results, we'll display alternative titles and offer torrent search in multiple results. Torrentz.eu works better for everything else, obviously :)
- b2spirit 14y agoOff-the-charts awesome!
- franzus 14y agoWow, top voted submission. I'm rather disappointed with the HN community. I guess it's time to stop visiting this site.
- FredericJ 14y agoOh. It's not possible to down vote such a comment. I guess it's time to stop visiting this site.
- lmarinho 14y agoI like the high resolution background image, maybe you could find a more graceful way of introducing it. Try fading it in after it has finished loading, like bing.com, instead of making the user watch it "build down".
- staunch 14y ago☑ Massive market opportunity ☑ Tons of room for product innovation ☑ Potential for significant revenue ☐ Ability to do business without being sued out of existence.
- nddrylliog 14y agoAnd that's why it's not a business. Just a temporary solution for movie lovers until content owners get their stuff straight. In the meantime, it's still a great product building experience for us, even if we make $0 out of it.
- staunch 14y agoThe problem is that you might not get to walk away scot-free from this even when you want to. One thing I can gaurantee will help you: make no attempt whatsoever to profit from this. Don't put up any ads. Don't have any affiliate links. Profiting from a (potential) crime or infringement makes it 100x more dangerous.
- nddrylliog 14y agoIndeed, I guess I'll postpone that flight to NY. No intentions to profit from this, except for the experience, the friends (and enemies) we make, and the excitement.
- ma2rten 14y agoI am surprised you are taking this so lightly. Are you sure this can not get you into trouble in France / the EU?
- krzyk 14y agoDon't forget that we (EU) have piratebay :) So he might (and hope he will) escape any consequences from big corps. On the other hand previous french president was pursuing hardcore copyright/IP laws.
- Eeko 14y agoYou can't even pay for this if you live in Europe. There's a reason Pirate Bay originated from Sweden...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- runn1ng 14y agoI don't like it that much. Yes, it's deadly simple, but what I actually like on sites like PirateBay or demonoid is the discussion below the torrent. Yes, it is sometimes idiotic and distracting, but if it's bad quality/a different movie/contains a virus, someone will mention that. With your website, I have no clue at all what I am downloading. What is the format? How is the quality? Is it nuked? Is it DVDrip/camrip/webrip/...? I don't know any of that from your site. I see just a link and filesize. Who knows what the file actually is. I personally find the quality more important than the number of seeders/leechers.
- nddrylliog 14y agoPower users are not well served with this version of movies.io Results are usually "pretty good", but that's nowhere satisfying for a connoisseur such as yourself. We're working on that though, but we'd much rather have people talking about the movie than about the torrent. A movie is art, it's emotions, stories, parts of our childhood. Much more interesting than a bitrate, a codec, a PSNR level.
- runn1ng 14y agoThat last part is true - and it's evident from your application that you give more weight to the movie than to the technical details. And it's good, in a way. But in my opinion, even to a less powered user, it's still important to know if he is going to watch a DVD-rip or a russian-dubbed camrip.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nddrylliog 14y agoMore importantly, it matters that the first result is a the cleanest rip possible in english. We'll add a dropdown for alternative languages etc., and subtitles, but we got to breathe a little first. Lotsa things in the issue tracker.
- tomp 14y ago
- dr_ 14y ago"please don't download content that you haven't bought" It's kind of hard to purchase The Avengers (2012) given that it's currently still running in theaters.
- phusion 14y agoVery nice, I love how clean the iface is. Adding imdb info to search results is very classy as well. Thank you!
- thebdmethod 14y agoI like the 1080p indicator! It would be cool to add similar ones for other formats (CAM, SCREENER, 720, etc)
- easymode 14y agoI really like what you've done. Torrent sites never had a clean look, and you are making it first. You are trying to make the world suck less, and i dig that. keep up the good work, and I really hope you can establish a legitimate business model based on this.
- nddrylliog 14y agoThanks a lot. I plan to make a living out of my programming & product building abilities but not in this domain, it's too messy. However, I hope we can reach an agreement with content distributors at least in some countries and replace the torrents by available legal sources. Thanks a lot for the positive feedback, got a lot of hate uncalled for here, that's refreshing :)
- waterlesscloud 14y agoYou will, of course, be making all code and all data you produce in your career publicly available as a torrent? If not, why not?
- nddrylliog 14y agoTo quote one of my favorite personas on the internet: "You's trolling". I buy a lot of indie content, I hope that it helps them make a living. I'm currently contacting people to try and start a legal offer for indie content: apparently nobody got that right yes (if you know of any, let me know). As for sharing my code, part of it, yes, open-source has been very beneficial to the software industry in the past... 30-odd years, and we plan on keep doing it since it seems to work out on everyone. I probably shouldn't even have replied to that comment, but from all my comments here it's pretty obvious what I really want to happen: it's not movies.io, it's a 'Steam' for movies. Who cares if you don't have the latest mainstream crap (read: BF3, etc.) as long as you have a sort of 'quality seal' and very very easy payment/access ?
- waterlesscloud 14y agoNope, not trolling. Just making a point. All of your comments aside, your actions, not your words, indicate that you're completely happy making the fruits of other people's labor available for free. You're not willing to do the same for your labor. It's not at all "obvious" that what you want to do is make a Steam for movies, because that's not what you're doing. If you want to enter into agreements to license the content easily and cheaply, then do so. That's not what you've done.
- mikecane 14y agoWhat metadata are you using to distinguish movies from other videos (and other things)? I did a test search for two European TV shows: Forbrydelsen (aka The Killing) and Braquo. The second didn't even try for an imperfect recommendation.
- thatusertwo 14y agoPretty site, it sure is a nice way to 'share' torrents, although its pretty illegal.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- thomasluce 14y agoRight or wrong, moral/ethical or not: I like the site. It works well, looks nice, and provides a clean interface to the information one would look for using such a service.
- dabockster 14y agoOh great... Now the MPAA will overreact and ICE will shut down YCombinator in the name of "national security".
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- leoplct 14y agoIt's awesome! Is there any change to made this legal??
- nddrylliog 14y agocf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058057 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058057 We're looking into it.
- veridies 14y agoI want to see something like this for music; I hate how badly sorted most public music trackers and search engines are. What.cd is fantastic, but I hate that they're private and don't use them.
- abhisec 14y agoI sincerely hope they don't block this, but this is an awesome awesome work. 1) Search is mind blowingly fast. 2) UI is clean 3) The torrents info about seed and leeches is awesome. You should be appreciated. Beautiful, beautiful beautiful.
- geuis 14y agoYour torrent results are absolute crap. Downloaded 3, won't say which, but they all turned out to be crap for lovelymovies.com which is a spam site.
- hk_kh 14y agoMy only tip: for the rating of the movie, while giving a decimal grade is good and acceptable, using 10 stars is distracting and breaks with the overall good UX. Would go better with just 5 stars, or just ditch them and think on something else. For instance, if the grade you are showing is a derivative of multiple sources, why not try to derive something on the line of: "5 of 10 reviewers found this movie good". By the way, always cite your information sources, where does the rating come from? Users? Review sites?
- necenzurat 14y agoheh, i watched http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html i don't ever care about copyright anymore
- cantbecool 14y agoWhat torrent sites are you scraping with nokogiri?
- domwood 14y agoI torrent stuff, like a substantial portion of humanity. Except music (Spotify) and games less than five years old. Movies I torrent without a care, unless they're indie or similar. Anyway, I digress, I'm just saying I'm not going to hypocritically pontificate, just comment on the product. On the actual site: I like the straightforward process you've gone for. A search for 'Dracula' returns multiple, relevant results with the year of release where it's available. It's very easy to find what movie I want. A downside is the download options, all I'm presented with is some links with the filesizes, that's not enough information in my opinion, but I suppose there's not actually much you can do about that. It's a downside because it's not immediately clear if it has subtitles, what language it might be dubbed in and if it is HD or not. It's a pretty well executed idea that's naturally going to be a bit rough 'round the edges, but it's a great start.
- programmer_babu 14y agoHey, bug report: you didn't check if the password I entered second time matches the first one.
- jcfrei 14y agolooking good - though it seems like you're filtering porn. obviously slightly less useful without pornography.
- leoplct 14y agoShould be greater a modal link (fancybox or facebox) with trailer! This project is awesome!!!! It's available code via Github??
- PhilRae 14y agoRegardless of what you're searching for, it is a really nice site and very functional. Yes all other torrent sites are hideous and full of horrible spammy adverts pretending to be download buttons (so I'm told), but this one is nice and clean, has a gorgeous UI, and makes great use of movie art in the design.
- nddrylliog 14y agoThanks a lot for the feedback! Glad you like it. We really love movies, hope it shows.
- scrod 14y agoPlease disable rubberband scrolling in Safari. body { overflow: hidden; }
- galfarragem 14y agoThere is one book from a portuguese writer where the argument is something like this: press a button, you'll get a million dollars and somebody (that you don't know) in a very far way place dies. Nobody will know about it just you. Will you press it or not? Piracy is the same. Is so easy to get and normally nobody will know, just a smaller reward and smaller consequences too. Most of people just press it.. disclaimer: I and nearly everybody somewhere during is life press it, specially if the "reward" is larger. A videogame in my country is around 75€, minimum wage less than 500€, unemployment rate among younger around 40%.
- nddrylliog 14y agoApparently Hollywood made that book into a movie: http://movies.io/m/TN http://movies.io/m/TN
- galfarragem 14y agoI heard about that movie, is based on ("The Mandarin", 1880) by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Maria_de_E%C3%A7a_de_Queiroz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Maria_de_E%C3%A7a_de_...
- nddrylliog 14y agoSee, that's the kind of info we'd like on movies.io. There's so much more about movies than you can learn about from TMDb, some people do research, are passionate about a particular subject, especially niche movies that aren't available anywhere (not legally, even often not by torrent). We'd love to nurture that. We're looking for a great way to manage that information: just 'comments' on the movie isn't going to cut it. Stay tuned.
- 5xz41s0P8T5N 14y agoPress button, use money to save >2 lives.
- galfarragem 14y ago
- wilfra 14y agoBut where are the flashing penis enlargement banners???
- nddrylliog 14y agoSorry, we don't have that feature yet. Or ever :) Just got contacted for an ad campaign and turned them down.
- paulovsk 14y agoBeautiful. The background HD image was a nice touch.
- nddrylliog 14y agoThanks! Blame http://themoviedb.org/ http://themoviedb.org/ for all the nice image resources. These guys do an amazing job. Props!
- fdjlda 14y agothis doesn't work anymore! I can't download anything :(
- eeirinberg 14y agothe downloads don't actually work!!!
- shmerl 14y agoJust a thought. If you consider the site as kind of a model and example for films distribution, why can't you add a [Donate] button, and direct all the funds to the corresponding companies who produced the movies? They might even get a better idea that convenient service without any DRM junk brings them revenue. Without such option the site is questionable.
- nddrylliog 14y agoWhat you suggest raises several important issues: first, we'd expect of these companies to go the extra mile of taking our money and redistributing to the rightful owners (which costs, it's a great deal of work to find out who owns what, be it in the music or movie industry). Second and most importantly, there would be no way for us to guarantee that the donations you make go to them and not us. We'd get shot down because we'd then try to 'profit' from it. Which we don't and we won't. So nope, no donations directly on the website, ever. However, we'll start displaying legal offers (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc.) for US visitors, and we're working towards featuring Open / Creative Commons / Libre movie content.
- shmerl 14y agoWell, first part is possible to resolve (but requires effort to find out who's the owner, yes). Second part can be resolved if you technically build the transparency system. I.e. those who pay will have a tracking mechanism for the transaction and would be able to confirm that their money aren't used by you. But in general I agree, it's more of a wishful thinking, in practice it requires effort. But you went so far as to make the site which offers a way to get the content completely for free. It would be fair to put at least some effort for enabling the backwards flow. If you are scared of being shut down, why not being scared of acting without respect to the creators of the movies? Linking to DRMed channels kind of defeats the purpose, since you are promoting a DRM free way.
- pbreit 14y agoWithout file formats it's a non-starter (unless, for me, they are all x264).
- nddrylliog 14y agoHover over the 'download' link, see full release name, often x264/h264 is present in the name.
- rjau 14y agoLove it. Really nice site, I'm going to have to try and remember to use this over torrentz.eu. Killer extra feature: Suggestions. But before you go reinventing the wheel, can you implement this? tastekid.com. Best recommendations I've seen. I believe they have an api.
- nddrylliog 14y agoReinventing the wheel is part of the fun. Recommendation algorithms are not that hard once you know the math behind. But, sure, it goes further than being a Rails dev. We'll compare with Tastekid for quality :)
- rdl 14y agoWow, this is quite a nice UI.