Show HN: moviepresto.com - a legal movies.io | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: moviepresto.com - a legal movies.io

moviepresto.com

4 pointsesonderegger10 comments

I should point out: The movies.io site itself may be legal, but the torrent links it contains are not (at least in the US).

Unfortunately, "Show HN: moviepresto.com, like movies.io, but with links to legal download sources" doesn't make for a very good headline.

1. Click 'top rated'

2. Click first movie

3. "iTunes link not found. Netflix Instant not found."

yeah... I think that's where we have the problem :(

p.s. also: nobody outside the US will be able to use this. As opposed to the competitor :(

Thanks for checking it out!

To be fair, Infernal Affairs is available on Amazon and as a disc Netflix will mail you. The optimist in me says this is where a site like this can do some good. Assuming viewers aren't wed to a particular platform, being able to see where a movie is available instead of searching iTunes, Amazon, etc. individually could make things easier.

As for competing with movies.io, my reaction to their site was "that's really cool - it's a shame there isn't anything like that for those of us who don't torrent", so I did my best to build one. I know right now it only works in the US, but hopefully working elsewhere is something I can add down the road. I don't really know enough yet about how to do that.

This is a really good idea, nice work! Making this work internationally will be very important if you want to be a legal competitor to movies.io. At the moment, none of the links work for me on any of the movies I tried. I saw links to iTunes/Amazon, but they are not available in my country (Netherlands).

Setting up country-specific links shouldn't be too difficult. I'd be happy to discuss implementation details with you, here or by email. Essentially you need:

- A way of identifying the country a user is in (GeoIP)

- A way of looking up country-specific links for each movie

Have you thought of doing something similar to http://takemymoneyhbo.com/? "This movie is not available legally in your country. How much would you pay to legally watch this movie right now?"

The resulting tweets could help growth, and you could become a standard-bearer for the people who want legal access to movies (which they are only denied due to moribund business models).

Ohhh, I just didn't get the UI!

I just saw the netflix logo on the right and the text about "Netflix Instant not found" above it. So my brain turned this into "There are two sources for this and both aren't available".

The "popular" page doesn't seem to work very well for you, since those movies tend to not be available.

Otherwise, nicely done.

Thanks!

The "popular" page pulls from TMDb's popular list. I suppose I could use something like iTunes's top rentals instead, but then I'd be trying to match up titles which can be less than 100% reliable.

A little bug: when I search for a movie and hit "View More", it just repeats the results of the search.

Oops.

Thanks for catching that. I built that button for the popular and top-rated pages, which come with lots of pages. It should be hidden for searches that return less than 20 results.

I'll get on this right away.

Good artists copy, but great artists steal.

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