Torsearch
Torsearch is a "media acquisition tool" that works strictly with Real Debrid. Torsearch makes it easy to search for and download your favorite movies and tv shows. You can think of it like Stremio, but without the streaming. Why the comparison to Stremio? That's because Torsearch uses the same source for media files that Stremio uses: Torrentio (hence the name: Torsearch).
After two failed attempts at running a media server, I decided to hang up my hat and give up on my dream of a self-hosted media server. I figured the days of torrenting were mostly over and everybody ranting & raving about their media collections must be going to Walmart and buying up the bucket of old movies they have. That is until I stumbled across Stremio and bookmarked it to read about after I got frustrated with whatever project I was working on at the time.
Cue the day I got frustrated enough with that project and finally looked into Stremio. At first, it seemed too good to be true, but I was yearning for something just sketchy enough to try out. What could go wrong with handing over my card information to an unknown organization across the pond? At the end of the day, the cost benefit analysis landed in my favor, and about 30 minutes after purchasing my Real Debrid subscription and setting up Stremio on my laptop, I was in business.
My mind was blown. I might not have the most "cultured" taste in media, but it had everything I searched for! After watching a few movies, I noticed the "Copy Download Link" button. "What's this lil guy do?" I asked myself. Duh, it downloads the fricking movie. And there's the 💡flashing over my head. There's gotta be a way to automate this, I told myself.
After about a month of studying Stremio's code and lots of tinkering, I figured it out. Torrentio is the magic behind the scenes. You feed it a Real Debrid API key and an IMDB ID, and it gives you a list of results to download that media. Easy peasy.
In about an hour I had a proof of concept working. It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't supposed to be. That proof-of-concept has blossomed into the beautiful Torsearch that I've been using nearly every day since then. The code in this repo is a complete re-write of the proof-of-concept that started out ugly and ended up even uglier. Knowing the core functionality required to make it work, I was able to re-write the app with some design patterns in place. It's now less ugly and quite functional. If you dig deep enough, you'll stumble across some of that ugly code that surprisingly still works (why fix it if ain't broke?).
Features
- Search for Movies & TV Shows by their name
- Download directly to your NAS
- Monitor TV Shows for new episodes and automatically download them
- Browse popular media and click into it to view download options
Getting Started
- Clone the repo