Show HN: Fakeflix – Netflix open source clone | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fakeflix – Netflix open source clone

github.com

153 pointsReDeiPirati79 comments

To clarify for anyone wondering, this is just a web dev experiment to create a clone of the Netflix UI. It doesn't let you watch movies, nor does it provide any kind of back end for serving video.

At first, I thought that this was a cool DLNA-like client.

Me too I like the ui of Netflix and would love a way to nicely should stuff from a ftp drive.

Check out Jellyfin: https://jellyfin.org/

I just installed jellyfin this weekend and I'm trying it.

IDK why there aren't more open source tools for this, IIRC Emby and Plex are not open source, and using a close source software for watching content from.. the high seas... is a bit risky IMHO.

> the high seas

I appreciate the expression.

Jellyfin is a community fork of emby.

I recently switched from Plex to Jellyfin due to the former's requirement that users must buy a PlexPass to download media you've shared with them. Relying on streaming for movie nights was a nightmare.

A community developer also recently launched their Plexamp-inspired iOS/Android music player on the stores.

https://github.com/UnicornsOnLSD/finamp

Wowie! I just installed this and this friggin rules! All of the features I care about from Plex, plus the ability to enable/disable transcoding on a per-user basis? Yes!

Jellyfin has some serious performance issues. I tried using it on a small 12TB zfs dataset of Linux ISOs and it only indexed ~20% after letting it run for a month. For comparison, my ffprobe scripts only take a day to collect media info about every file and figure out what needs to be transcoded.

The web UI is also a buggy js SPA that doesn't use meaningful URLs with "#". So when it breaks, you can't reload the page and get back to page you were on. It's incredibly frustrating.

Unfortunately, Jellyfin is the only open source video server I could find that kinda sorta works. So this is as good as it gets unless you wanna get your hands dirty and rewrite large parts of it.

nb. I did not try out the online metadata fetching because I didn't want to give it internet access. I assume that enabling online metadata will make the server even slower

> It doesn't let you watch movies, nor does it provide any kind of back end for serving video.

You just killed my dream of starting a unicorn and filing to SEC for a FFLX ticker

Hypothetically you could use popcorn time as a back end

Warning for all mobile users or those of you without unlimited data: This website will download almost 75MB of data when you first open it.

A _tiny_ side note:

You'd be better served using an example.com email address for test accounts over a test.com account, with the former being a reserved domain name and the latter being a real one.

https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved

I think 99% of the "hard stuff" at Netflix is serving the video.

The rest of the apps are mainly display and a little bit of crud.

It's so easy for them to continue to experiment with the front end all the time -- because it's "not that hard" (tm).

But the video serving? Rendering? Streaming in different resolutions? The video player? CDN's? Damn, that sh*t rough brah.

CRUD stuff can be complicated at Netflix-scale.

Just the translations of such an app would drive me batty.

I think 99% of the "hard stuff" at Netflix is serving the video.

Making a robust, consistent, fast user experience that works well across all devices, resolutions, and network conditions is quite hard.

If it was easy then fewer websites would suck.

I am curious - I'm just doing a somewhat naive implementation for a private project. Do you have any pointers to a writeup of some specific problems I might not have encountered yet ?

Honestly the official Netflix site seems to perform similarly to your implementation in terms of number of files it downloads and the size of files.

One thing I found was when emulating mobile screen size I wasn't able to horizontally scroll with my track pad. It works on Netflix though. I'm betting you'll find 100+ of those 'small' things with user testing across different OS/browser combinations.

I'm just implementing this on a very tiny level. Just one video that will maybe get a view every other day or so. I do have adaptive streaming and something that qualifies as "CDN" only if you squint.

But it's not harder than most other IT niches one might get into. I am not saying it's without challenges - I pulled plenty of hair. Just that it's doable and that all the parts one might need are available for me to built into a usable system.

Scaling that up will might be hard in the sense that it's a lot more expensive, but the core technology is there.

Oh I was not critiquing your effort at all. In fact, good job. It was actually amazing.

I am realizing now that what I wrote reads like I was the author of Fakeflix - I am not. Sorry for the confusion..

Disclaimer, I worked at Netflix for 5 years. There are some interesting challenges in the clients. The TV client needs to run on devices with very little memory, and processors roughly as powerful as a Pentium 2. The JavaScript must be interpreted too, no JITing allowed. Getting smooth experiences everywhere in the world where internet quality and device power varies drastically, all in one code base that about 100 people work on, is a pretty good challenge. For example an entire proprietary "browser" was created with the goal of being low memory and high performance. So for TV devices, the entire dev stack from top to bottom had to be created mostly from scratch. This included forking React to create a version that would run on this platform.

It's also interesting on the other end, what cool stuff can be done on the PS5 for example? Shaders and animation techniques are also pretty interesting to explore.

Just to confirm. My son still uses my first generation iPad from 2010 - an a4 processor running at 400Mhz with 256MB of RAM to watch Netflix.

Meanwhile, I can't install Netflix on my 2016 iPad Mini because it's stuck on iOS 12 and the Netflix app requires iOS 13.

So much for Apple "lifetime support", half of the store apps you want to use can't be installed anymore. If you don't have an iTunes backup, you're SoL.

I’m not sure what Apple and Netflix are doing there. I have a 2012 iPad that has the Netflix app already installed and it works fine.

My Kids' iPad is on iOS 9, and I was able to download Netflix for it. I remember there was a "older version" button I needed to press when I downloaded it, so you might still be able to get at least Netflix on that one.

This only works if you are on an Apple ID that has had the old version of the app installed at any point in time, sadly. I don't have access to my old Apple IDs anymore, so I can't install any old apps.

If you have a newer device, you can use your current ID to download the latest version and use your same login on your older device.

Yes you can. Apple has supported installing the “last compatible version” since 2013. I can reset my original iPad, install Netflix and it will ask do I want to install the last compatible version.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250476703

The same works for Plex.

If you have ever installed it anywhere you can reinstall it.

BTW, Apple never promised “lifetime support”.

What if I don't? This is on a new Apple ID.

It's impossible to install old versions of apps without ever having "owned" them, even if they're free. Your "solution" also doesn't work for all apps on the store, quite a few of them don't offer old versions anymore at all.

Any app that requires server side support like YouTube won’t work regardless if they allowed you to download the client if they no longer support that version of the API.

I noticed the same with the Kindle app.

DRM! Reading the headline I thought someone found an open way to ship videos in a copyright friendly way

If the UX isn't the hard stuff, I hold no hope for anyone else.

I'm yet to experience a media streaming product that can hold a candle to Netflix in terms of UX on any platform.

On my 2017 (non-Android) 4K "Smart" TV, the Netflix app is light years beyond everything else for UX, performance, everything, there's just no competition.

I think BBC iPlayer is as good in terms of UX

No disrespect meant to their engineering team, because I actually think Netflix does a much better job and produces less buggy software than any other streaming app, but the hard part is acquiring and/or creating a catalog worth subscribing to. The quality of the user experience is overwhelmingly determined by the quality of what they're watching.

This is the basic reason why, though I'm sure they pay the engineers "well," they're not getting the $500 million deals the high profile writers and directors are getting.

> I think 99% of the "hard stuff" at Netflix is serving the video.

The hard stuff is licensing content, IMHO. The technical bits aren't easy, but they're mostly straight-forward stuff that small teams can work on and make incremental progress towards. Having an existing large base of revenue and users and having a clear focus enabled Netflix to get licenses and make a good experience, and continually improve it (although, I have some nits to pick, of course).

Other companies have streaming services of course, but none of them have the organizational focus to make things work as well, IMHO.

I remember there was some guy who programmed a YouTube Instant search after Google rolled it out on their search. The then YouTube CEO reached out and offered the guy a job. I can see this happening here, this is really impressive. But, it would have been even better if clicking play would result in a rick roll.

An MIT open source project I created is Video Hub App which is "like YouTube for videos on your computer"

Maybe interesting to some of you: https://videohubapp.com/en/

https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

wow thanks.

Looks good. What is the chance that Netflix would ask GH to drop it, sue the developers, and etc?

i wondered about that too. Seems unlikely given its an experiemnt with no connection to video content. However, the legal system has amazed me before...

Probably zero. It's just a SPA that grabs images from https://www.themoviedb.org. It doesn't actually do anything.

I don't think they have anything to worry about, anyway you can't spend all your life fearing lawyers.

I hope Hulu steals this, their new UI is really awful and they don't seem to comprehend no matter how many people tell them their UI is really awful.

It really is terrible! I always try to hold my tounge whenever the UI changes in an app, because it's usually just me not liking a "new" ui. But they have had this for months|years? now. if people are still saying your UI is bad after an extended period, then I think it's safe to trust them

This is just a project someone made to put in their portfolio, it's nothing serious.

Like Repl.it?

Oh, I'd love to see this as an Jellyfin skin/theme.

Second that, heck I’d pay for that skin in a heartbeat. Fantastic work, really!

It's seriously impressive how much css3 can do. I opened that one https://codepen.io/claudio_bonfati/pen/mdryxPv with the expectation there's going to be a good chunk of javascript in there, but nope. Pure css.

I'm working on similar streaming application as a side project, was expecting to see how static media serving strategy with concurrency being handled but this is just UI..

After seeing this, I thought here goes another programmer in the jail for pirating.

But you disappointed.

Jokes apart, looks cool and fast.

This would be a real useful repository for someone trying to create a phishing website.

I wonder if this could be connected to Jellyfin.

the logo is amazing

For those interested in a nice self-hosted media server, I used to use Plex but am really happy with Jellyfin[1] these days.

[0]: https://jellyfin.org/

Well, I'm impressed by the demo. That's fancy and works.

I've been running it in Docker on my file-server machine for a while. Worked great until the Roku "app" suddenly started failing with most videos, then later all videos, across multiple devices. I don't think I've even looked at it in months, after the first couple upgrades to Jellyfin itself, and to the Roku app, didn't fix anything, though it's still running. Their official Docker image works really well and the web version is good.

https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/jellyfin/jellyfin

Thanks for the feedback. Not moving away from plex anytime soon then.

Jellyfin pairs well with LibreELEC running on Raspberry Pi. there is an addon which keeps the library (including watch status) in sync with the native Kodi library across multiple devices.

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