Show HN: CineCLI – Browse and torrent movies directly from your terminal

20 comments

·December 23, 2025

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

Visit

pedromoss

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/

bryanrasmussen

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

How do you stream a timestamp?

unpopularopp

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

Where’s good these days? I’m feeling my old Napster ways bubbling back up from the deep…

unpopularopp

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

voidUpdate

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

elliotec

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.

Datagenerator

Thank you for creating this!

samsep10l

leave a feedback folks:|

cfcfcf

Perhaps consider a public domain film for the demo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_do...

brrrrrm

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

Or use a terminal recorder to generate it:

https://github.com/orangekame3/awesome-terminal-recorder

shlip

Great tool I would have loved back when I watched movies :) Could the same be done for music ?

vibesareoff

>Use it. Fork it. Improve it.

These———LLM———slop———READMEs———make———me———vomit.

behnamoh

does it violate ISP terms (like at&t)? how to make it less obvious to them?

Barathkanna

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.

haunter

Yes, it’s just a plain CLI access to YTS torrents

    BASE_URL = "https://yts.lt/api/v2"

dewey

That depends entirely on what you download, the country you are in and your ISP.

welferkj

Standard precautions apply when using the internet while under authoritarian jurisdictions.