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Show HN: CineCLI – Browse and torrent movies directly from your terminal
Hi HN
I built CineCLI — a cross-platform terminal app to browse movies, view details,
and open torrents directly in your system torrent client.
Features:
- Search movies from the terminal
- Rich UI with ratings, runtime, genres
- Interactive & non-interactive modes
- Magnet handling via system default client
- Linux/macOS/Windows support
- No ads, no tracking
GitHub: https://github.com/eyeblech/cinecli https://github.com/eyeblech/cinecli
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/cinecli/ https://pypi.org/project/cinecli/
Would love feedback from terminal + Python folks
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- samsep10l 9mo agoleave a feedback folks:|
- vibesareoff 9mo ago>Use it. Fork it. Improve it. These———LLM———slop———READMEs———make———me———vomit.
- _zoltan_ 9mo agoGet used to it. Nobody will write readmes by hand. I've always hated it and now I'll just let the LLM write it.
- nurettin 9mo agoIt used to be "don't try to outsmart the compiler", I'm waiting for the time people start saying the same thing about LLMs.
- rvz 9mo ago"you're absolutely right!"
- thinkingemote 9mo agoIt's certainly a sign of something. Not positive at best neutral. As you say it's at best an indication that the author doesn't like writing. Could it be an indication that the author didn't write the actual code? Is it a sign that the author doesn't really care that much about their project and furthermore could that be a sign that the project is also be be valued by us as much as the author? Maybe the code quality and documentation is less important than the utility. After all many of us don't like writing tests for code! Perhaps but perhaps we just need to get used to these signs too and get over it.
- samsep10l 9mo ago[flagged]
- latexr 9mo agoThis argument is getting old. Just because you don’t like something, it doesn’t mean everyone agrees and will take the same shortcuts you do. Fortunately not everyone in the world has the same disregard for their own work, and many of us understand the signal it sends when you’re unwilling to even write your own instructions. If you want your READMEs sloppily written by LLMs, that’s your prerogative. Just like it’s the prerogative of everyone visiting your repo and bumping into a slop README to decide if they want to even give your tool a second look before abandoning it. Slop READMEs suggest slop code. Soon everyone who’ll even look at your code are other sloppers and (if it ever gets popular) malicious actors who’ll exploit it in an afternoon because no users understand anything the code does.
- KeplerBoy 9mo agoThen get some freaking taste in READMEs. We can guide the LLMs to better results.
- latexr 9mo agoThe emoji everywhere is what does it for me. Emoji on every title. Emoji on every item of a list. The same ones over and over. So much visual noise. They’re used like a deficient visual crutch.
- mr_mitm 9mo agoI always tell my LLMs: "Try not to sound like an LLM. And no emojis!" Works alright.
- shaky-carrousel 9mo agoMost boring part of developing is writing docs. I see it as boilerplate. If you don't like it, you're free to open a PR.
- vibesareoff 9mo agoThe whole repo is fucking boilerplate.
- samsep10l 9mo ago[flagged]
- brrrrrm 9mo agolooks cool! one bit of feedback: make your demo gif get to the point faster. either practice typing a bit quicker or speed it up 2x for the typing section
- cfcfcf 9mo agoPerhaps consider a public domain film for the demo? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_do...
- shlip 9mo agoGreat tool I would have loved back when I watched movies :) Could the same be done for music ?
- g947o 9mo agoMight want to add a disclaimer/warning and/or add additional confirmation/wording before downloading. You don't want your user to go to jail because of a mistake that could be avoided: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364645
- behnamoh 9mo agodoes it violate ISP terms (like at&t)? how to make it less obvious to them?
- dewey 9mo agoThat depends entirely on what you download, the country you are in and your ISP.
- haunter 9mo agoYes, it’s just a plain CLI access to YTS torrents BASE_URL = "https://yts.lt/api/v2"
- samsep10l 9mo agokinda , yeah - sickos
- Barathkanna 9mo agothe tool itself doesn’t change anything from the ISP’s perspective. It just fetches metadata and opens magnet links. What matters is what you download, where you live, and how your torrent client behaves, not whether you clicked the magnet in a browser or a terminal.
- caminante 9mo agoThe subject is movies (cough copyrighted), not Linux distros. This is an important caveat to raise for someone experimenting. To your point, it's the upload that gets you in trouble in the US (assuming possession is not illegal in itself)
- g947o 9mo agoI think the issue is the lack of disclaimer/warnings in the CLI, unlike what most torrent sites do. These sites are very considerate, e.g. for YTS > Warning! > > If you are not using a VPΝ already: Accessing and Playing Torrents on a Smartphone is risky and dangerous. You may be in [City, Country] and using: () . Your IP is [IP] . We strongly recommend all users protecting their device with a VPΝ. I couldn't find anything in the CLI, at least from that gif. Someone who is new or less "experienced" in this might not be aware that they need to use a VPN or similar, since the CLI makes it so easy to search and download. Even you are an experienced user, you may misread and start torrenting by mistake before connecting to VPN. One could argue this is a serious bug.
- Datagenerator 9mo agoThank you for creating this!
- unpopularopp 9mo agoIf you know how to use a CLI tool then you could also know how to download proper high quality releases without much effort. No private tracker and interview shenanigans. YTS is a bottom of the barrel quality. I actually don't even see who is the target audience of this unless you just made as an exercise to build an app on top of an API.
- flave 9mo agoWhere’s good these days? I’m feeling my old Napster ways bubbling back up from the deep…
- elliotec 9mo agoSame, I know how to use a terminal quite well but don’t know the latest best way to “sail the seas” as they say.
- unpopularopp 9mo agoFirst of all this the ground 0 for everything piracy (and more, generally free stuff) https://fmhy.net/ https://fmhy.net/ Here are the recommended film sites https://fmhy.net/video#torrent-sites https://fmhy.net/video#torrent-sites I generally download from https://rutracker.org/ https://rutracker.org/ (need an account to search not for downloading). They have pretty much everything that you can imagine (not just films) and in proper quality too (BD Remuxes etc). There will be no scene releases here because they add russian/ukrainian dubs and subs to almost all films but that's a small problem. The other one is Heartive which lists torrents from the DHT network with Magnet links https://heartiveloves.pages.dev/ https://heartiveloves.pages.dev/ You just click on the torrent icon in the middle top of the selected film and all the available releases will be listed in plain text. The only downside that you need to be familiar with the release tags Last but not least https://nyaa.si/ https://nyaa.si/ if you have a slight interest in anything japanese from manga to anime to much more
- thijson 9mo agoThanks for the links. I'm so out of it these days, I only knew of btdig.com for DHT searches.
- pedromoss 9mo agoGreat job! I've achieved comparable results on my Android TV with Stremio[1] and the Torrentio[2] plugin. Being able to use the terminal for streaming would be a nice thing to have in Linux. It would also be cool to check for malicious files before downloading. [1]: https://www.stremio.com https://www.stremio.com [2]: https://torrentio.org/ https://torrentio.org/
- danr4 9mo agoshhhhhhhh
- Frotag 9mo agoSo torrentio provides the metadata and downloads the video on-demand. And stremio handles UI and playback. That's a pretty neat way to keep the storage reqs minimal. This got me thinking if jellyfin could be configured for something similar (I don't feel like migrating to yet-another-media-library) and turns out it supports .strm files [0], which are literally just urls in a text file (much like .m3u8 playlists) [1]. My use case is private trackers so I would have to write a custom scraper to replace the torrentio functionality anyways. So it probably wouldn't be too hard to have it generate .strm placeholders at the same time. Hopefully there aren't any performance / transcoding issues ... [0] - https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajellyfin%2Fjellyfin+strm&type=issues https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajellyfin%2Fjellyfin+strm&... [1] - https://emby.media/support/articles/Strm-Files.html https://emby.media/support/articles/Strm-Files.html
- bl4kers 9mo agohttps://github.com/lostb1t/Gelato https://github.com/lostb1t/Gelato
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agoWhat I'd like - a tool to stream to timestamps and then stream out between two timestamps to a local file. This would really improve various workflows.
- cbluth 9mo agoHow do you stream a timestamp?
- reactordev 9mo agoYou negotiate the header to find the video length, to then issue http get requests with the offset to the timestamp. Sometimes there’s an API that cuts with ffmpeg and returns the buffer. Sometimes you just need to fetch the raw bytes between offset+0 and offset+n.
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agoI'm not sure if you're being facetious and making fun of my saying stream a timestamp instead of stream to a particular time in the video, but if so I guess https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364765 suggested a way. I just expected you would stream to point X in the stream that would be to the timestamp set to start and then to point y which would be the end. Obviously it would have to be able to figure out how the streamed file would map to time, which I don't know how to do which is why I said I would like a tool that did it other than announcing I made a tool that did it myself. Of course obviously some tools like yt-dlp etc. have this capability with the --download-sections property but I want something for torrents.
- cbluth 9mo agoNo, I totally misunderstood. I vibe coded a little tool [0] that can stream range requests from torrents. It's a little buggy and super rough around the edges, but it's definitely possible because your torrent client can prioritize piece requests and http standards support http range requests, just requesting parts of a document. I lightly tested it with VLC and seeking the playback to the middle of a video [0] https://github.com/cbluth/bittorrent https://github.com/cbluth/bittorrent
- tinuviel 9mo agoYSK there is a (seemingly famous) subreddit named eyeblech that is pretty graphic/NFSW.
- cachius 9mo agoThis community was banned for repeatedly violating Reddit's Moderator Code of Conduct.
- zwnow 9mo agoSo people cant name their project in a way cuz of some reddit gooners? Fuck reddit lol
- notachatbot123 9mo agoPSA: It is NSFL, don't be curious and ruin your day.
- g947o 9mo agoI'm confused -- how is that related to the topic here?
- godelski 9mo ago[flagged]
- 9mo ago
- philonoist 9mo agoHopefully there is a Libgen version of this.
- hauxir 9mo agobuilt something similar but a webapp where you can search using any tracker supported by jackett and stream in your browser, can have a look here https://github.com/hauxir/rapidbay https://github.com/hauxir/rapidbay
- seyz 9mo agoI honestly couldn't tell if the GIF was lagging or if that's the actual typing speed. I give lessons to help reach double digit WPM if you're interested
- nmstoker 9mo agoYes, this seems something that would be so easy to get right. Not to take away from the achievement of this repo but no one benefits from a recording where the person doing it hasn't decided up front what they're going to demo and then ponders if they type magnet or just delete it and go with the default. If someone has gone to this much effort with a project, surely they can do a few fun throughs, till they can demo it smoothly. Sure, leave pauses, for people to follow what's actually happening but don't draw out the typing, that's just painful!
- mlrtime 9mo agoCame here for this comment, that was the slowest video ever hah. Couldn't watch till the end. Also OP, you have a pip update!
- samsep10l 9mo ago[flagged]
- godelski 9mo agoIronically their GitHub profile links to their monkeytype profile. But really, they just need to learn some basic ffmpeg...
- Twixes 9mo agoAn echo of Popcorn Time can he heard bouncing around the software cathedral… The takedown notices will start coming in if CineCLI is too easy to use! Though looks like it doesn't play anything itself – _might_ be safe
- japborst 9mo agoRIP Popcorn Time. It was fucking amazing.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- squibonpig 9mo agoIs it actually gone? I found official looking sites on a quick Google.
- scirob 9mo agoits strange how we can't just build software that then works for ever. The emulation boys got something going but netowkred software unlikley
- scirob 9mo agocould we not bring back popcorn time if it goes over to decentralized github : https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/
- dcreater 9mo agoLooks vibe coded.
- backtogeek 9mo agoProbably is, nice that people who do other things apart from learning to code all day can get their ideas out of their heads.
- dcreater 9mo agoNot so nice that those ideas are not production ready i.e. well tested and validated. Leading to all sorts of issues and headaches for the unsuspecting customer
- theshrike79 9mo agoDo you expect every public github repo to be "production ready"? I think I have to take every single of mine down then, they're all made for me and do what I need them to do. There's zero consideration for "production" of any kind. It works on my machine and might work on yours.
- dcreater 9mo agoIf the repo is making releases on its public page, then yes, that literally implies production ready.
- backtogeek 9mo agolooks pretty cool, will add it to the never ending list of stuff to test
- 0nabilbk 9mo agoGreat Job, Love the idea
- G_o_D 9mo agoTerrarium TV Was OG which gave rise to forks like corn Time, Cinema APK, TeaTV, BeeTv
- orliesaurus 9mo agoW for pirates
- indigodaddy 9mo agoAssuming we could uv run/tool install this or whatever is the best quick/easy way with uv?
- nemoniac 9mo agouvx cinecli search "star wars"
- 0x457 9mo agoTorrenting without seeding should be a crime.
- jklein11 9mo agoDepending on the content you are torrenting it might be a crime. That goes for Torrenting while seeding too though
- 0x457 9mo agoI'm aware of the current state of things. I was making a joke out of frustration with 99% of torrent participators not having the entire movie to seed and leaving seeding as soon as they stopped watching.
- mikalauskas 9mo agoThis is just a yts API wrapper