I'm not going to lie, that's what inspired me, but on a podcast I recently listened to: http://technophiliapodcast.com/2012/episode-25-interview-wit... They said they were planning on going legit and go with only indie movies, but that would be a bummer, and with the recent demonoid takedown, I thought it would be an interesting project to play around with.
movies.io founder here, I definitely said that in that podcast, but changed my mind since.
Going legit is too much trouble. The world of licensing is way too complex and antiquated - and we would've been forced to adopt DRM, which is a step back, in my opinion: http://amos.me/blog/2012/vision/
So, in short, movies.io's not going away, and yes we're keeping torrents.
Pretty much every movie out on video is available via one of the online platforms (currently iTunes, Amazon Instant, Netflix, and Redbox), but availability outside the US is still frustrating.
As always, when one copyright-infringing service is shut down, it's replaced by something more distributed and robust: it's called Library Genesis. As I understand it, they distribute the catalogue in incremental chunks via BitTorrent, which means there are multiple mirrors and no single point of failure.
That actually sounds like a great idea. I have nothing but time at the moment (start-up I was working for recently laid me off) I will definitely consider a project along those lines. Thanks for the recommendation.
If anyone is interested, I've just written a small Grease Monkey plugin to convert the magnet urls to real torrent urls on moviemagnet.net and movies.io, thanks to torcache.net:
Well, adding 'real torrent urls' to movies.io is trivial, if we don't do it there's a good reason. Even TPB moved away from torrent links and to magnet links. It's one added layer of indirection that makes the whole system harder to break.
I would be trivial to use real torrents, but I could easily get into a significant amount of trouble if I hosted up real torrent files though. Magnet links are just a link, nothing more. It wouldn't help anyone if I was taken down. I'm hosting this in the USA on a linode at the moment.
There is little distinction between in my mind between the torrent, whose bencoded 'info' dict sha1 hahses to the 20 byte magnet link, and the magnet link.
The hash uniquely identifies a torrent. Either way, you are presenting a representation of the torrent.
You might as easily argue that a torrent file cannot infringe, since it only presents sha1 hashes of chunks of files contained within the torrent, not the actual files themselves.
No, I didn't try that. I have all wide screen devices at home, but I could understand that it potentially could be an issue with 4:3 displays. I'll roll it out on next deploy.
Absolutely. Ruby on Rails 3.2.8, Postgres, theMoviedb.org for the movie information and pretty backgrounds, jQuery autocomplete for the insta search functionality, nokogiri gem for the magnet link scraping, and Google fonts.
