Leonard Euler
Newbie
- Jul 20, 2024
- 16
- 21
Hi All,
Since my teenage years, I have been interested in how the movie streaming websites work. I have mostly done backend development (java) and
for the recent couple of years DevOps. But the frontend has always attracted me for some reason. So, 2 years ago, I started the website for movie
streaming. I didn't know how existing websites work (WordPress plugins, embedded links, etc.), so I created everything from scratch. Initially, I would
download movies from torrent websites, transcode them to HLS, MPEG-DASH streams using ffmpeg and other tools and upload the results to cloud
storage. Soon, I realized it was taking too much time, so I created a GitHub Action that would do the job for me provided the MKV/MP4/AVI file and the
transcoding spec, which is telling the action which audio/subtitle streams to transcode, which resolutions, etc. This saved me a lot of time, but still it was
taking to much (finding the source files in torrent trackers, checking which audio streams are available, etc.). So I came up with the crazy (at least for me) idea.
I created movie/tv-show scraper. So provided just movie id (say from TMDB) it would go to preconfigured torrent trackers, find the best releases based on
resolution, available languages, then automatically trigger transcoding jobs. It would also check every day if better resolutions, more languages are available
and update accordingly. Currently, I have about 400 movies and 30 tv shows. I don't use third-party embedded links. I am approaching 100k/monthly users.
This is the good part) The bad part is I don't know where to go from here. The whole system (proxy servers, transcoding servers, cloud storage, etc. ) takes 500$/month
to run. I think I have hit a wall on monetization and traffic increase aspects of the project. Recently I was thinking to abandon it, but it is a little difficult as I have
put a lot effort and time into it (though I have also learnt a lot of new things). I was also thinking of creating embeddable URLs so that other can put them in
their website, not sure though if it will work as there are a lot of competition there too, also I don't have enough movies.
I just wanted to share my story with you.
Best Regards
Since my teenage years, I have been interested in how the movie streaming websites work. I have mostly done backend development (java) and
for the recent couple of years DevOps. But the frontend has always attracted me for some reason. So, 2 years ago, I started the website for movie
streaming. I didn't know how existing websites work (WordPress plugins, embedded links, etc.), so I created everything from scratch. Initially, I would
download movies from torrent websites, transcode them to HLS, MPEG-DASH streams using ffmpeg and other tools and upload the results to cloud
storage. Soon, I realized it was taking too much time, so I created a GitHub Action that would do the job for me provided the MKV/MP4/AVI file and the
transcoding spec, which is telling the action which audio/subtitle streams to transcode, which resolutions, etc. This saved me a lot of time, but still it was
taking to much (finding the source files in torrent trackers, checking which audio streams are available, etc.). So I came up with the crazy (at least for me) idea.
I created movie/tv-show scraper. So provided just movie id (say from TMDB) it would go to preconfigured torrent trackers, find the best releases based on
resolution, available languages, then automatically trigger transcoding jobs. It would also check every day if better resolutions, more languages are available
and update accordingly. Currently, I have about 400 movies and 30 tv shows. I don't use third-party embedded links. I am approaching 100k/monthly users.
This is the good part) The bad part is I don't know where to go from here. The whole system (proxy servers, transcoding servers, cloud storage, etc. ) takes 500$/month
to run. I think I have hit a wall on monetization and traffic increase aspects of the project. Recently I was thinking to abandon it, but it is a little difficult as I have
put a lot effort and time into it (though I have also learnt a lot of new things). I was also thinking of creating embeddable URLs so that other can put them in
their website, not sure though if it will work as there are a lot of competition there too, also I don't have enough movies.
I just wanted to share my story with you.
Best Regards
