cine-cli

Warning

Educational use only. Streaming and torrenting may be restricted in your country and may violate the terms of service of the content providers and local laws. The authors do not endorse piracy and are not responsible for misuse. Use this project only with content you own or have rights to access.

Watch anything from your terminal. Browser-first, multi-provider, torrent web UI — one shot.

cine "inception"
cine "breaking bad" -e 5:1
cine "matrix" --download

Browser-first. Finds via TMDB, streams via 6 embed providers. Torrent mode boots a self-hosted WebTorrent web UI on localhost:3737 and opens it in your browser.

Install

npm install -g cine-cli

Requires Node ≥ 18 and a modern browser. xdg-open (Linux), open (macOS), or cmd /c start (Windows) for handoff.

Tip

Ad-free Experience: Streaming providers often contain ads. It is highly recommended to use Brave Browser or a browser with an ad-blocker (like uBlock Origin) for the best ad-free experience.

Usage

cine [query] [options]

  -e, --episode <ep>     Format `episode:season` or just `episode` (TV only)  e.g. 5:1 or 5
  -c, --choice <n>       Auto-select a search result (1-based) and skip the picker
  -d, --download         Open the embedded torrent web UI instead of streaming
  -p, --player <name>    Override the auto-detected browser (xdg-open/open/cmd)
      --provider <id>    Skip the provider picker, use this provider id directly
      --list-providers   Print every provider and exit
      --no-banner        Skip the welcome screen
      --no-color         Disable colour output
      --smoke            Run full flow in non-interactive mode (no browser open)
  -U, --update           Update cine-cli to the latest version
  -V, --version

Examples

# Movie
cine inception

# TV series, specific episode (S05E01)
cine "breaking bad" -e 1:5

# Auto-pick first result and first provider (for scripts)
cine "inception" -c 1 --provider vidsrc

# Torrent flow — opens web UI, prefilled with the magnet
cine "matrix" --download

How it works

query ── TMDB (multi-search) ── imdb_id ── providers ── pick ── xdg-open ──▶  browser

                                                    └─── --download ──▶  torrent web ui (localhost:3737)

Six providers ship out of the box:

id	upstream
vidsrc	vidsrc.to
vidking	vidking.net
vidlink	vidlink.pro
vidsync	vidsync.live
cinesrc	cinesrc.st
lordflix	lordflix.org

Providers are pure URL templates over IMDb IDs — adding a new one is a one-line append in src/providers.js.

Torrent mode

--download flips the terminal output into the torrent flow. We hit the public torrentio API, sort by seeders, and the highest-quality torrent is picked. A Node.js WebTorrent server is spawned (no telnet, no subprocess weirdness — same process tree), listening on 127.0.0.1:3737, and your default browser is opened with the magnet preloaded.

The web UI supports multiple concurrent downloads (MAX_CONCURRENT = 5 by default), pause/resume/remove, and live Socket.io updates. No login, no tracking.

Architecture

src/
├── cli.js               commander parser + flow orchestration
├── tmdb.js              thin TMDB client (multi-search + external_ids)
├── providers.js         provider templates → URL builder
├── scraper.js           search formatting + provider resolution
├── play.js              xdg-open handoff
├── torrent/
│   ├── index.js         torrentio fetch + sort by seeders
│   └── server.mjs       embedded WebTorrent server (subservice)
└── ui/
    ├── theme.js         color palette, gradients, panels
    ├── banner.js        welcome screen
    ├── spinner.js       @clack spinner (TTY-only, no-op elsewhere)
    └── prompts.js       search input + provider picker (fzf when available, clack fallback)

public/
└── index.html           torrent runtime UI shell
└── styles.css           terminal-style themes + tokens (dark / light)
└── app.js               GSAP-driven UI + socket.io realtime stream

Pure Node.js + native fetch from undici. No bundler, no transpilation, single package.json.

Dependencies

Runtime:

• @clack/prompts — modern input prompts
• chalk — terminal colour (level-3 24-bit)
• commander — argv parser
• express, socket.io — torrent web server
• webtorrent — peer-to-peer torrent client (browser-side, ships in the page)
• gradient-string — banner brand gradient
• open — cross-platform browser launcher
• undici — fast HTTP client for the TMDB API

External tools (peer):

• fzf (optional) — uses it for every picker when present, falls back to @clack/prompts otherwise
• xdg-open / open / cmd /c start — for the browser handoff
• Web browser — any modern browser, since torrent streaming runs in-browser

Security

Known advisory: CVE-2024-29415 (HIGH) — ip SSRF in isPublic

The vulnerable package is ip@2.0.1, pulled in transitively via: webtorrent → torrent-discovery → bittorrent-tracker → ip@^2.0.0

cine-cli v5.1.0+ mitigates this by overriding ip to ^1.1.9 (pre-CVE, no breakage in the IP-range APIs used by the tracker). The advisory database may still list the advisory for the declared upstream range; the actual installed ip version is safe.

npm audit fix --force would roll webtorrent back to the 0.x API line (a different, deprecated package), which breaks cine-cli's API surface. That suggestion is incorrect for this project and should be ignored.

If you find another issue, please file it at github.com/4shil/cine-cli/issues.

Inspiration & Credits

This project is heavily inspired by:

• ani-cli — the ultimate CLI tool to browse and stream anime.
• mov-cli — the modular movie scraper CLI.

License

MIT