We're not good at niches (japanese movies, etc.), yet! But we're working on better international support: Japanese, German, Italian, French movies have often confusing results, we'll display alternative titles and offer torrent search in multiple results.
Torrentz.eu works better for everything else, obviously :)
I recently arrived in Germany and movie/cinema aggregation is a huge issue and a hassle tbh, so I'll be using this frequently.
A suggestion, if I may, is to add language of the movie if possbile? It'd be great if there's any way to fetch that info and display it directly on your website instead of visiting every multiplex website to check it.
I'm impressed! The suggestions from your algorithm contains lots of movies I'd watch (and a bunch I've already seen and like a lot)
This is awesome.
(Since I usually watch movies on iTunes and I really hate dubbed movies, I'd love it if I could filter by movies available on iTunes in Austria in their original language -- but I guess that's asking a bit much...)
Just a tip, in case you find your way to adding it - while browsing through the India selection, I find that there are movies from different languages - I found Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil movies. My suggestion is that if you find a way to add a language filter, in addition to a country filter, that might help? This might be useful for others as well - for e.g a lot of Spanish speakers might look for movies from South America etc.
This is incredible! Does anyone know of other sites like this for films from other countries? I've been looking to broaden my cinematic horizons a bit, as well as hunting for material to practice language comprehension.
The last one I tried was Emby, sometimes during the pandemic, and it just flat-out didn't come up with a number of movies that matched the number of movie files in the directly I pointed it at. It also seemed to mis-match or fail to match many of them. Admittedly, I have a decent percentage of foreign-language movies, mostly in filenames with their English-translated titles, but Emby would often pick an English-language movie that did not match the filename exactly, while ignoring a Korean (for example) movie that did.
IIRC, it was even worse when it came to TV. Fortunately, I was running it side-by-side with Plex, so after about a week of trying to get it to recognize my entire collection, I just gave up and deleted it.
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.
I love the UI and the results! I'd just say that I have two concerns; while the click-to-add nature of the genre list is great, I don't think it's immediately intuitive. Perhaps I'm just part of the old "if you click a link it takes you to a page" demographic, but clicking to add or subtract -- while in my opinion the right mechanic here -- isn't immediately obvious. Making it more clear how this works could save you some traffic by avoiding requests from people who don't immediately understand how the UI works.
The second thing is that, on browsing movies "from Japan," I immediately get Band of Brothers, Kill Bill, Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai, and the latest American reboot of Godzilla. If it's intended to show movies set in a particular country, that's potentially a really cool gimmick, but as it is it seems inaccurate.
I still prefer the look of TorrentBulter.eu. It's default view is browsing the top movies, and displays them in a much more enjoyable manner. The details page on TB is also more feature filled, including a trailer as well (granted, these can sometimes be wrong).
Movies.io, honestly, doesn't offer anything more, other than being newer. Maybe I missed something.
I torrent stuff, like a substantial portion of humanity. Except music (Spotify) and games less than five years old. Movies I torrent without a care, unless they're indie or similar. Anyway, I digress, I'm just saying I'm not going to hypocritically pontificate, just comment on the product.
On the actual site: I like the straightforward process you've gone for. A search for 'Dracula' returns multiple, relevant results with the year of release where it's available. It's very easy to find what movie I want. A downside is the download options, all I'm presented with is some links with the filesizes, that's not enough information in my opinion, but I suppose there's not actually much you can do about that. It's a downside because it's not immediately clear if it has subtitles, what language it might be dubbed in and if it is HD or not.
It's a pretty well executed idea that's naturally going to be a bit rough 'round the edges, but it's a great start.
Along the same lines to your suggestion (thus, piggybacking): A filter based on principal language of the movie[s].
For example, if I want to discover new movies in German, Swedish, Norwegian, etc., I have to know the name, first, for the search operation; otherwise, I just movies with the term in the title (e.g.: Svenska returns Svenska tv-historier, Svenska fall, Svenska Hollywoodfruar, Barncancergalan - Det Svenska humorpriset, Svenska Truckers, and Svenska Powerkvinnor).
Which leads me to a suggestion, based on that:
If there's no steam available, don't return the result in the search[1]. The whole intent of the site to show "where to stream" but if there's no stream, returning a result with the message 'Sorry, we couldn't find any streaming information.' is a bit of a false positive -- in a "we have it but we don't" sense.
So the movie I wanted to see is currently available in another country or has been available in mine but not now. The UI could be tweaked to explain that and not (negatively) surprise customers but it seems that you already know that. Probably you have plans to improve it.
Your approach is similar to TV, a list of programs to choose from but not the full catalog. Given these terms I'm not sure I'll ever be a customer but this business model seems to be serving you well so I can hardly criticize it.
You can use http://moreflicks.com to find out in which country a movie is available. Not quite finding out everything that's available but still useful.
Torrentz.eu works better for everything else, obviously :)
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