
Show HN: movies.io — torrent search like it should be - nddrylliog
http://movies.io/
======
edw519
I 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.

~~~
laughinghan
I'll bite.

Why do you think this "clearly unethical"? I don't think it's clear at all.

Everyone I know pirates movies, TV shows, and music. Everyone I know also
jaywalks. I also know people who use drugs illegally, as well as participate
in or facilitate underage drinking, and I don't have a problem with any of it.
Are these unethical? Someone clearly thought so. Do I care?

You know what the truth is, for me, and everyone I know, at least? The truth
is, we don't care about "other" people's opinions on ethics (where "other"
people=people on the internet, in the government, in anti-piracy ads, etc).
The fact is, it's _socially acceptable_ , among my social circles, to pirate,
to use drugs, and to {participate in,facilitate} underage drinking. So I have
no qualms with people I know doing so, nor if I were to do so myself.

You don't pirate, ever? Because it's "clearly unethical"? Do everyone in your
social circles hold similar opinions? Do you jaywalk? Have you ever used
drugs, or facilitated illegal drinking?

Those aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely curious.

I guess my point is, I don't think ethics matter. I don't think about whether
what I do is ethical. I don't hurt people, and I don't steal (physical
things), because I have empathy. I guess you could say I have ethics in that
if you asked me why I don't, I'd say "it's wrong", but I'd never say something
is "clearly unethical" and try to argue why. I'd say it's wrong because it's
hurtful, and I don't like being hurt.

Is this just me?

~~~
ma2rten
Since you asked, I shall explain. Here is my working definition of something
that immoral:

    
    
      Violating the written or unwritten rules of the society one
      lives in, in a way that is directly harmful to another person or
      group of people, though ones actions. 
    

So taking drugs is fine, since you are not harming another person. Downloading
a film is also fine for the same reason. With selling drugs and jaywalking it
depends.

Building a torrent site is different though, because under the rules of our
society someone who made a movie can decide who sees that movie and who does
not. You are taking that right away from them by distributing that movie. If
the rules make sense or does not really matter (within reason), it is a rule
that we as a society agreed upon.

EDIT: I don't think morality can ever be subject to loopholes and
technicalities, it's governed by common sense.

However, the counter-argument that would let count is good intentions: if OP
truly believes that the world might become a better place as the result of his
action and he has no selfish motivations at all, I might consider it moral (at
least from his point of view).

~~~
laughinghan
1\. To be immoral, something both has to violate rules of society in addition
to being "directly" harmful? So if it's directly harmful but violates no rules
of society (e.g. beating and raping women in societies where that's socially
acceptable), or it violates rules of society but is only indirectly harmful,
it's perfectly moral?

2\. What's your working definition of "directly harmful"? Littering directly
harms wildlife, does it directly harm people? Buying some drugs directly
supports people who actively harm other people. Last I heard, there was
mounting evidence that second-hand smoke was worse than what used to be
believed; is smoking indoors "directly harmful" to other occupants?

3\. I'm not sure what you mean by "counter-argument" (what are you arguing
against? Your definition?), but you seem to be saying you feel like there
should be intentionality in there somewhere but you're not sure where. I hope
you don't need me to tell you that muddies the issue further, e.g. religious
fanatics that really believe they're saving souls or the world when they hurt
people.

~~~
ma2rten
Are you seriously not understanding what I am saying or are you just looking
for a discussion?

You asked (basically) why anyone would consider jaywalking, taking drugs, and
downloading movies to be ethical, but not hosting a torrent site. So, I tried
to give a rough stipulation of my own personal ethics. That definition was not
meant to be universal, bulletproof, or exhaustive.

1\. My point is that what is considered harmful or not is decided by the rules
of society. Different societies agreed upon different rules about what the
rights are of a person. If there was a society were there copyright is not
commonly accepted then making a movie pirate site is (obviously) not a
problem. If you don't agree with the rules, you should work to change them,
but not take justice in your own hands.

2\. Specifically, I was thinking about a situation where you buy drugs and
that money gets used to finance a drug war. Even though, I think that is bad,
I don't think it an deciding factor in this case if buying drugs was legal or
not.

3\. That's why I added "from his point of view". If I would consider it
ethical in this case depends on whether I think it is reasonable or not, and
whether the mean justifies the end in this case.

~~~
laughinghan
I'm sorry, I now realize I didn't express that I was looking for a discussion,
you seemed open to that.

1\. I feel like you're conflating societies' notion of what people are allowed
to do, which is what I'd understand "rules of society" to mean, and societies'
notion of what counts as harmful, which I wouldn't consider to be the same
thing.

2\. I see...so what's your working definition of "directly harmful", and how
do, say, littering and second-hand smoke fall into it?

3\. I assume you meant "whether the ends justifies the means". So how does the
reasonability, and whether the ends justifies the means, fit into your working
definition?

------
runn1ng
I 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
Power 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
That 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.

~~~
nddrylliog
More 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.

------
rsingel
That'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
According 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>

~~~
nddrylliog
Yup, 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
It 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
Oh, yes, I can definitely guess the _thinking_ behind it, I'm just saying this
thinking is antiquated and doesn't work well in 2012.

------
staunch
☑ Massive market opportunity

☑ Tons of room for product innovation

☑ Potential for significant revenue

☐ Ability to do business without being sued out of existence.

~~~
nddrylliog
And 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
The 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
Indeed, 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
I am surprised you are taking this so lightly. Are you sure this can not get
you into trouble in France / the EU?

~~~
nddrylliog
Thankfully France is not the only french-speaking country.

Don't be surprised: I'm taking this "fuck it, we need to do something"
approach. We've been trying to get heard by content owners for years but
nothing has worked. If this is the only thing we can do, I'll do it.

I'm more curious than anything to see if this will get me into any real legal
trouble. I believe what we do is legal, I also wish we didn't need to do it at
all.

As mentioned previously, if I could have simply built a good front-end that
calls an API to license content, I'd have very happily done it.

Coming from the music industry, when I hear the excuse "but it's hard to
create a worldwide licensing system like you ask", I say bullshit. Both the
movie and music industry are waaaaaaaaay behind in terms of technology, and
everything is so inefficient.

Ever tried to obtain the rights to (legally) burn a CD compilation of your
favorite songs? You'll have to send snail mail, make phone calls, wait weeks
for confirmation (while you pay, of course), if you're very lucky you'll be
done in 6 months with a lot of work. This is not the way it should happen.

Some start-ups (say, <http://official.fm/>) are working towards resolving the
situation on the music side: providing a friendly licensing platforms for
content owners is a good start. But that only works for small to middle
content creators/owners. The big will never bow to that, they'll always go for
their own, often crappier, solution.

So, I'm willing to work on their own terms: you give me an API key, a doc, and
you decide the pricing. That's all I ask. Then we can all get busy building
apps around content, which is what is dear to my heart.

Hope this helps.

------
lbo
I built a somewhat similar product <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
Do 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.

------
denzil_correa
A 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
cf. <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4054667>

Displaying by default would confuse lambda users. How would you solve it UX-
wise?

~~~
Terretta
I 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>

Another example[2], variously tagged HD720 and HD1080, with the latter clearly
wrong.

2\. <http://movies.io/m/4o>

~~~
nddrylliog
Definitely: 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.

------
hhimanshu
is 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-
lawsu...](http://techland.time.com/2011/08/30/expendables-piracy-lawsuit-
dropped-for-now/)

~~~
smartendone
No, 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
Also, legislation differs depending on the country you live.

Get informed!

------
citricsquid
How do you plan on staying online?

~~~
nddrylliog
\- 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.

~~~
white_devil
> 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]=4fb448ea613f5d5be...](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&timestamp=1338576974951)

> 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
Wanted 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

      > 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."

~~~
canadaduane
Your analogy is paired because both piracy and meth are illegal in the USA.
However, the pairing lacks equivalence in my view because crystal meth is
clearly (and by nature, not by law) harmful to the user, while piracy is not.

A better analogy might be a website that helps others circumvent the Great
Firewall of China. It is illegal in one particular country, but circumvention
does not harm individuals (only the society, one could argue). "We don't
circumvent the wall, we don't run a proxy, we don't belong to tor: that's how
not interested in circumventing the wall we are."

~~~
rmc
Your censorship analogy is flawed, since copyright infringement is not legal
in any country (im not sure, but Ethiopia might have started recognising
foreign copyrights now)

~~~
PeterisP
Downloading movies from torrents is legal in Canada (covered by a copyright
levy on data storage media), for example.

~~~
krzyk
In Poland it's also completely legal if you don't distribute (seed) it. Legal
for movies and music, illegal for programs/games.

~~~
nddrylliog
Same goes here in Switzerland. We have a tax on storage media that is supposed
to cover that use case.

------
Tmmrn
Not 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
Konqueror 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
Not 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
So, a user setting would work then?

------
hardik988
I'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
Definitely. See <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-
stat...](http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-cant-even-identify-a-state-
bittorrent-judge-rules-120515/)

------
domwood
I 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.

------
CyberThijs
I'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
Definitely, definitely, very strongly on our TODO list.

Consider this a first step :)

------
phoboslab
It certainly looks nice, but it's not really accurate. E.g. the page for Moon
links to Twilight torrents: <http://movies.io/m/9t>

~~~
nddrylliog
Our 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
When 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
Definitely in the works.

~~~
user24
Hijacking 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
So, 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.

------
kurtvarner
I've always wondered why _all_ torrent sites look like ass. Nice job with
this.

~~~
rplnt
It's tracker sites that often look like ass.

~~~
jsprinkles
Gazelle is awful, and far too many private trackers use it.

~~~
danberger
what's so awful about it?

~~~
phos

      - 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.

~~~
nddrylliog
Interestingly, movies.ioi is a relatively clean rails app.

Sure, we still have to refactor our TMDb client into a separate lib, stuff
like that. But otherwise good clean MVC.

------
dr_
"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.

------
trueluk
Warning to those at work, there's at least one NSFW image in rotation on the
landing page.

~~~
nddrylliog
Yup, 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
If 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
That'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.

~~~
saraid216
What 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
Sounds 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.

------
notaddicted
Pretty.

I searched for the film 8 1/2 (<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>

~~~
nddrylliog
Entirely agree, I suggest you edit the TMDb entry to make it better :)
<http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/422>

We don't yet update our stuff from TMDb once cached, but will do soon.

------
guard-of-terra
Why? 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
We'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 :)

------
galfarragem
There 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
Apparently Hollywood made that book into a movie: <http://movies.io/m/TN>

~~~
galfarragem
I 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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Maria_de_E%C3%A7a_de_Queiroz)

~~~
nddrylliog
See, 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.

------
espadagroup
Nice job, the first thing I would like to see is a tag for CAMS and TeleSyncs.

~~~
nddrylliog
Thanks 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.

------
stfu
At least in Opera the search function is not really working. Neither pressing
Enter no clicking on the magnifying glass does the trick.

~~~
nddrylliog
Reported, 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
Same thing happens sporadically in Chrome too.

------
sboak
It needs to be able to distinguish the different types (DVDRIP, TS, etc...)

------
jack-r-abbit
I 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.

~~~
nddrylliog
We bought <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)

~~~
jack-r-abbit
I can't argue with that. I'll certainly keep this one in my mind when I am
looking for a movie. Good job. Stay focused.

------
xal
I want this except with paying to get an actual license.

~~~
nddrylliog
We 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.

------
dclaysmith
I'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
if you hear more about this, let me know: I'm as curious as you.

------
pooriaazimi
Feature 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
We hate lightbox as much as you do. No, more!

Yes, the backdrops are awesome (thank the amazing guys at
<http://www.themoviedb.org/> !), we'd like to find a cool way to let you show
them without crowding the interface.

~~~
wavephorm
Tmdb 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
Apparently they're using an scraper. See his/her other comment here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4054755>

~~~
nddrylliog
The TMDb API v3 is good. We're scraping Torrentz for the results, might do our
own indexing later.

Oh, and "his".

------
hristov
How 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?

------
guynamedloren
YES! 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
There 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
I wish you were right, but I don't think Johnny Law agrees with you.

------
pooriaazimi
BUG:

\- Resource interpreted as Font but transferred with MIME type text/plain:
"[http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Reg-
webfont-6690edfe4c4ab548613...](http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Reg-
webfont-6690edfe4c4ab548613491ba6f916cd2.woff)

\- Resource interpreted as Font but transferred with MIME type text/plain:
"[http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Lig-
webfont-653131606c56b81c0ae...](http://movies.io/assets/Lato-Lig-
webfont-653131606c56b81c0ae5a882a781ce74.woff)

(Safari 5.2 beta, OS X Lion 10.7.3, though that is clearly irrelevant!)

~~~
nddrylliog
Aw fuck, missing mime-type in the nginx config.

I clearly suck at sysadmining.

------
rplnt
I miss the time when torrentz.com (now <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
Fair 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
Maybe someone got scared? I don't know.. but my guess would be a better CTR on
sponsored links that are shown alongside trackers.

~~~
nddrylliog
Ah, 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>

------
ecaroth
NICE! 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
Hover over the 'download' link and you'll see the full release name :)

~~~
pault
The only reason I still use tpb is the comments will usually let you know if a
torrent is of poor quality, passworded, etc. Consider adding peer ratings for
video and audio quality.

~~~
nddrylliog
Passworded torrents? Dear god, where have you been?

As for poor quality etc. here's our stance: by default, the first search
result should be a release of 1) reasonable quality 2) reasonably well seeded.

For power users, we're working on user settings to adjust your preferences for
release groups, etc.

Of course, working from a .avi/.mkv/.mp4 file would be optimal because we'd be
able to get a lot of codec info from there, but we won't go so far.

~~~
paulovsk
>"Passworded torrents? Dear god, where have you been?"

That's actually pretty, pretty sad. Last week I've downloaded the most seeded
torrent of the movie "In Time" and it came passworded.

I got all surprised because it was THE MOST SEEDED.

~~~
nddrylliog
Yeah, indeed.

Wow, I've only seen passworded rar files on, say, DDL. We gotta be careful
about that, thanks for the heads up!

------
notatoad
it'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
The first result should be reasonably good. We're working on that to improve
the algorithms and find the best possible torrent.

------
shmerl
Just 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
What 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
Well, 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.

------
PhilRae
Regardless 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
Thanks a lot for the feedback! Glad you like it. We really love movies, hope
it shows.

------
rjau
Love 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
Reinventing 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 :)

------
easymode
I 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
Thanks 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
You 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
To 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
Nope, 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.

~~~
nddrylliog
Then again, I'm not exactly finished yet.

But I understand your point of view. Reading my other comments here would give
a more complete overview of how I feel but I don't think many people have the
patience to do that.

------
programmer_babu
Hey, bug report: you didn't check if the password I entered second time
matches the first one.

------
Eeko
You can't even pay for this if you live in Europe.

There's a reason Pirate Bay originated from Sweden...

------
mikecane
What 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.

------
lmarinho
I 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".

------
veridies
I 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.

------
stevengg
you 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>

~~~
nddrylliog
Actually, 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!

------
Dirlewanger
Very 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
Understood. 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.

------
sandropadin
Looks 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.

------
geuis
Your 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.

------
phusion
Very nice, I love how clean the iface is. Adding imdb info to search results
is very classy as well. Thank you!

------
dabockster
Oh great... Now the MPAA will overreact and ICE will shut down YCombinator in
the name of "national security".

------
leoplct
Should be greater a modal link (fancybox or facebox) with trailer! This
project is awesome!!!!

It's available code via Github??

------
thebdmethod
I like the 1080p indicator! It would be cool to add similar ones for other
formats (CAM, SCREENER, 720, etc)

------
seanieb
<http://torrentbutler.eu/> seems to have a better UI.

~~~
wingerlang
Came here to say this. I love the wall of movies, no need for searching.

------
radley
Needs better search logic & display results.

Clicked on #2 "Safe" and 4 out of 5 were for "Safe House".

~~~
nddrylliog
Yup, 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.

------
thatusertwo
Pretty site, it sure is a nice way to 'share' torrents, although its pretty
illegal.

------
pbreit
Without file formats it's a non-starter (unless, for me, they are all x264).

~~~
nddrylliog
Hover over the 'download' link, see full release name, often x264/h264 is
present in the name.

------
mikemarotti
I sure as hell ain't downloading any movies from mystery trackers.

~~~
nddrylliog
Look again: there are only magnet links on there.

Trust the DHT :)

~~~
ben0x539
As someone not too familiar with p2p technologies: What difference does that
make for the user?

~~~
nddrylliog
I 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> ) 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-d...](http://infworm.com/fit-the-entire-pirate-bay-site-on-a-usb-drive)

~~~
tbeseda
Magnet 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...

~~~
nddrylliog
Definitely. We're thinking of open-sourcing it, but we want to clean it up
first.

Just a Github button away...

~~~
bennomadic
nah... community is always good at cleaning-together :)

~~~
nddrylliog
I'd love to meet that community :)

Communities are generally pretty bad at product design though. Having a BDFL
that has ears open but a straight cannon. We're trying to do that here.

------
b2spirit
Off-the-charts awesome!

------
silentscope
you incite the wrath of the gods. hope you know a lawyer.

~~~
nddrylliog
Several!

------
leoplct
It's awesome! Is there any change to made this legal??

~~~
nddrylliog
cf. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058057>

We're looking into it.

------
paulovsk
Beautiful. The background HD image was a nice touch.

~~~
nddrylliog
Thanks! Blame <http://themoviedb.org/> for all the nice image resources. These
guys do an amazing job. Props!

------
cantbecool
What torrent sites are you scraping with nokogiri?

------
jcfrei
looking good - though it seems like you're filtering porn. obviously slightly
less useful without pornography.

------
rdl
Wow, this is quite a nice UI.

------
fdjlda
this doesn't work anymore! I can't download anything :(

------
eeirinberg
the downloads don't actually work!!!

------
rdegges
This is beautiful. Thanks! <3

------
hk_kh
My 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?

------
wilfra
But where are the flashing penis enlargement banners???

~~~
nddrylliog
Sorry, we don't have that feature yet. Or ever :)

Just got contacted for an ad campaign and turned them down.

------
necenzurat
heh, i watched <http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html> i
don't ever care about copyright anymore

------
franzus
Wow, top voted submission. I'm rather disappointed with the HN community. I
guess it's time to stop visiting this site.

~~~
FredericJ
Oh. It's not possible to down vote such a comment. I guess it's time to stop
visiting this site.

