[HN Gopher] Show HN: CineCLI - Browse and torrent movies directl...
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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 PyPI:
https://pypi.org/project/cinecli/ Would love feedback from
terminal + Python folks
Author : samsep10l
Score : 288 points
Date : 2025-12-23 05:17 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| samsep10l wrote:
| leave a feedback folks:|
| brrrrrm wrote:
| looks 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
| froddd wrote:
| Or use a terminal recorder to generate it:
|
| https://github.com/orangekame3/awesome-terminal-recorder
| cfcfcf wrote:
| Perhaps consider a public domain film for the demo?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_do...
| shlip wrote:
| Great tool I would have loved back when I watched movies :)
| Could the same be done for music ?
| vibesareoff wrote:
| >Use it. Fork it. Improve it.
|
| These------LLM------slop------READMEs------make------me------
| vomit.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Get 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| "you're absolutely right!"
| thinkingemote wrote:
| It'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.
| latexr wrote:
| This 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.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| the world is moving towards this, so all the naysayers
| will be dinosaurs :-)
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Then get some freaking taste in READMEs. We can guide the
| LLMs to better results.
| latexr wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I always tell my LLMs: "Try not to sound like an LLM. And
| no emojis!"
|
| Works alright.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Most 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 wrote:
| The whole repo is fucking boilerplate.
| g947o wrote:
| Might 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
| behnamoh wrote:
| does it violate ISP terms (like at&t)? how to make it less
| obvious to them?
| dewey wrote:
| That depends entirely on what you download, the country you are
| in and your ISP.
| haunter wrote:
| Yes, it's just a plain CLI access to YTS torrents
| BASE_URL = "https://yts.lt/api/v2"
| Barathkanna wrote:
| the 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I 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 VPN 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 VPN.
|
| 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.
| welferkj wrote:
| Standard precautions apply when using the internet while under
| authoritarian jurisdictions.
| caminante wrote:
| >authoritarian
|
| Copyright is widely adopted even in the most liberal
| democracies.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| Thank you for creating this!
| unpopularopp wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Where's good these days? I'm feeling my old Napster ways
| bubbling back up from the deep...
| elliotec wrote:
| Same, 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 wrote:
| First of all this the ground 0 for everything piracy (and
| more, generally free stuff) https://fmhy.net/
|
| Here are the recommended film sites
| https://fmhy.net/video#torrent-sites
|
| I generally download from 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/
| 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/ if you have a slight
| interest in anything japanese from manga to anime to much
| more
| thijson wrote:
| Thanks for the links. I'm so out of it these days, I only
| knew of btdig.com for DHT searches.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Also https://fmhy.net/torrenting#aggregators
| plexman wrote:
| also http://piratebayo3klnzokct3wt5yyxb2vpebbuyjl7m623iax
| mqhsd52c... via torbrowser
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I just use ye old faithful of piratebay, through the tor
| browser so my ISP doesn't do shenanigans to it, then ffmpeg
| to get only the streams I care about (video, english audio /
| japanese audio + english subtitles) and reencode it to h264
| mp4 so the files aren't gigantic and are compatible with
| everything. A bit old-school maybe but it generally works
| fine for me.
|
| I live in the UK so I'll also sometimes pull stuff from
| iPlayer, which yt-dlp works perfectly for, and also off
| youtube
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| that seems like a lot of work compared to click click watch
| that one can achieve with *arr stack.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Sure, but this way I know what I'm getting, rather than
| just hoping I get the right thing. I don't mind doing a
| little bit of cleanup to make sure I'm getting what I
| want
| squigz wrote:
| Just to be fair, the *arr stack can filter by various
| things so you only grab the releases that meet your
| requirements.
| throwaway98753 wrote:
| And if you don't want to torrent at all, there are recent
| tools (nzbdav) to build a large *arr library that streams
| directly from usenet, without need for self-storage
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| in several countries it's fully legal to download
| anything for personal use, so I don't care :P
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| Can you please reconsider using TOR for piracy? It strains
| the Tor Network and makes life harder for exit node
| providers. The Tor Project has advised against it as
| well[0]. There are many cheap VPN Providers that allow port
| forwarding and will give you an even better torrenting
| experience.
|
| Using the Tor-Browser to get the links on ThePirateBay et.
| al. is of course fine, torrenting the content though is
| where it becomes a problem.
|
| [0] https://support.torproject.org/about-tor/using-and-
| sharing/t...
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I don't torrent through tor, I just use it to get the
| links. I've found that if I use TPB on the normal
| internet, my ISP (or someone who can see my connections)
| seems to be poisoning the results, since all my torrents
| result in a 1.89gb executable file that I'm sure as hell
| not opening. Getting the links through tor doesn't have
| the same issue, and then I download them over the normal
| internet, and everything works fine
| bigmadshoe wrote:
| If you're connecting through a VPN there is no way for
| your ISP to know that you're using TPB or any other
| website.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I know, that's why I use tor to get the links
| hypercube33 wrote:
| They can if you let DNS leak to their servers so make
| sure you really firewall your ship off
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| Can you share the magnet link that they send you and
| maybe the name of your ISP? I'd be super interested in
| analysing this!
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I'll try to remember to but it'll be about 16 hours away
| meindnoch wrote:
| Impossible. How would your ISP (or VPN provider or
| anyone) be MITMing the TLS connection to TPB?
| gs17 wrote:
| > 1.89gb executable file
|
| Add me to the list of people curious about this. It feels
| more like some sort of bug than a real attack, it would
| be odd to use such a huge file for _every_ torrent.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| There is an uptick of isos and exes masqueraded to look
| like episodes of popular shows.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| On the other hand, the system would be doomed if it
| relied on 1:1 message board scolding the few good actors
| to be viable.
| cantalopes wrote:
| I highly recommend setting up a kodi combo: real-
| debrid/fen/seren/coco scrapers/tmdb helper with your trakt
| account/arctic fuse 2 (netflix like skin). It is a complete
| "stream everything" netflix interface.
|
| It takes quite a while to understand how to set everything up
| and needs tons of customization (which is also a positive),
| but reddit is your friend. For example this is a good guide
| (although bit dated, some info may be older but generally it
| still fits https://www.reddit.com/r/Addons4Kodi/comments/zzfd
| tb/allincl... )
|
| I know people also use *arr stack and jellyfin to setup their
| own library but my problem is that i never /know/ what to
| watch. With this setup, i just turn it on, get to browse
| customized/recommended and random lists like in netflix and
| it streams directly via real-debrid or premiumize
|
| Oh; if you decide to have a dedicated raspberry pi for this
| thing (so you can use it with tv easilly), use a regular
| raspbian os or something, do NOT use libreelec. It is trying
| to be heavily customized, but in the end is just worse,
| buggy, bad wifi support, slow releases from small team, and
| unability to manually update packages
| hambos22 wrote:
| > I know people also use *arr stack ... i never /know/ what
| to watch
|
| For discoverability you should check overseerr, which is
| pluggable via API to sonarr and radarr
| rochansinha wrote:
| I have been using realdebrid with POV on kodi and it works
| like a charm. Saving a bunch by not needing to subscribe to
| what seems like a million OTT's
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I know people also use *arr stack and jellyfin to setup
| their own library but my problem is that i never /know/
| what to watch.
|
| For people like me, knowing what to watch is never a
| problem. Getting time to actually watch it is.
|
| I suggest finding a way to do your own curation.
|
| For movies, you could just start with the IMDB Top 250
| (pick at random). They used to have other lists (e.g. top
| non-English movies, etc), but I can't seem to find them any
| more.
| colinsane wrote:
| for public torrents, skip the trackers and just run a DHT
| crawler like bitmagnet. it'll take a month to "catch up", but
| after that you'll have more indexed content than any
| individual tracker & it'll be way snappier.
| tomtomtom777 wrote:
| This is neat. I didn't realize this was possible with the
| protocol. Thanks!
| g947o wrote:
| For old content I often spin up the old RARBG database.
|
| Too bad it's gone.
| pedromoss wrote:
| Great 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 [2]: https://torrentio.org/
| danr4 wrote:
| shhhhhhhh
| Frotag wrote:
| So 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&...
|
| [1] - https://emby.media/support/articles/Strm-Files.html
| bl4kers wrote:
| https://github.com/lostb1t/Gelato
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| How do you stream a timestamp?
| reactordev wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| I'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 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.
| brendami-8 wrote:
| How do you stream a timestamp?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367384
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| in fact I will point out that if this were possible and people
| had a lot of data of people using streaming out sections of
| torrents instead of the whole stream it would be another bit of
| evidence for torrents being used for fair use.
| tinuviel wrote:
| YSK there is a (seemingly famous) subreddit named eyeblech that
| is pretty graphic/NFSW.
| zwnow wrote:
| So people cant name their project in a way cuz of some reddit
| gooners? Fuck reddit lol
| kiddico wrote:
| Not that kind of nsfw.
| zwnow wrote:
| Maybe nsfl would have been more fitting then
| notachatbot123 wrote:
| PSA: It is NSFL, don't be curious and ruin your day.
| cachius wrote:
| _This community was banned for repeatedly violating Reddit 's
| Moderator Code of Conduct._
| g947o wrote:
| I'm confused -- how is that related to the topic here?
| herghost wrote:
| the linked Github repo shares the name
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| I assume OP knows what the word they use as their alias means?
| philonoist wrote:
| Hopefully there is a Libgen version of this.
| hauxir wrote:
| built 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
| seyz wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| Came here for this comment, that was the slowest video ever
| hah. Couldn't watch till the end.
|
| Also OP, you have a pip update!
| godelski wrote:
| Ironically their GitHub profile links to their monkeytype
| profile. But really, they just need to learn some basic
| ffmpeg...
| Twixes wrote:
| An 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 wrote:
| RIP Popcorn Time. It was fucking amazing.
| squibonpig wrote:
| Is it actually gone? I found official looking sites on a
| quick Google.
| scirob wrote:
| its strange how we can't just build software that then works
| for ever. The emulation boys got something going but
| netowkred software unlikley
| scirob wrote:
| could we not bring back popcorn time if it goes over to
| decentralized github : https://radicle.xyz/
| dcreater wrote:
| Looks vibe coded.
| backtogeek wrote:
| Probably is, nice that people who do other things apart from
| learning to code all day can get their ideas out of their
| heads.
| backtogeek wrote:
| looks pretty cool, will add it to the never ending list of stuff
| to test
| 0nabilbk wrote:
| Great Job, Love the idea
| G_o_D wrote:
| Terrarium TV Was OG which gave rise to forks like corn Time,
| Cinema APK, TeaTV, BeeTv
| orliesaurus wrote:
| W for pirates
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Assuming we could uv run/tool install this or whatever is the
| best quick/easy way with uv?
| nemoniac wrote:
| uvx cinecli search "star wars"
| 0x457 wrote:
| Torrenting without seeding should be a crime.
| jklein11 wrote:
| Depending on the content you are torrenting it might be a
| crime. That goes for Torrenting while seeding too though
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