For a no hacks alternative, I built TV Explorer. It puts the channel's published HLS stream into your browser with no interim steps. Uses the public GitHub list of more than 10,000 free channels.
That is an unbelievably slick thing that you've got there.
It feels very light-weight, it's approximately instantly-responsive. Back button works. I don't understand the stats (or my contribution to them), but whatever.
(the closed-captioning pop-up causes some overlay issues for me, though)
moar edit: Upon further review with my very not-special desktop box, I'm reasonably confident that this is the quickest, most-responsive "TV-watching" experience I've had since analog NTSC left the scene ~eons ago. It's fast like switching from channel 11 to channel 13 used to be with the very quickest and most well-behaved of tuners.
What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing?
I'm pretty sure it was built by a compiler, using libraries provided by Google and others. Until Claude can directly output machine code packaged for distribution, it's just another middleman between the source of intent (the human) and the final deliverable.
Usually piracy software tries to maintain a little plausible deniability, but here this is suggesting it will help you stream this weekend's newly released $250m blockbuster.
I’m not against piracy but the initial pitch made it seem like it’s more purely for trying to cast streams embedded in websites that you already are visiting and/or have access to, of which do not “allow” you to cast, or for whatever reason only work on a laptop and not on something like AirPlay. But the LLM-slop description of “random websites” in addition to the option for a TVDB API key confuse me as to what the actual focus is here.
I mean I get it, but also it's funny that you commented this 5 minutes after you edited the readme[1] to add in the exact type of plausible deniability I remarked was absent.
I work with browser fingerprinting, so I took a look at the repo to see what it actually does. From what I can tell, it only patches navigator, the Audio API, and the Canvas API. That is pretty basic, so it will likely get flagged easily.
I thought the whole point of turnstile was that it detects headless browsers and it's supposed to be "difficult" to bypass. Apparently this just simulates clicking on the checkmark. Is it really that easy?
With the right simulated events, a headless browser becomes indistinguishable from a real browser without platform detection. It's not hard to figure out that these headless browsers are running a software renderer on Linux. In time, they're just going to have to detect Linux users and force them to fill out one or multiple challenges if workarounds like these keep getting used.
The checkbox is just a small part of what the checks are doing. It's monitoring everything the browser is doing and how the browser is responding to certain events up until you tick the checkbox, at which point it determines if you need one of those "are you human" challenges or if you can pass without interruption, based on how bot-like you are.
People have been automating WoW for a generation using things like peripherals duct taped to oscillating fans despite multi-million dollar budgets designed to defeat things far more sophisticated than this.
I would think of headless browser automation in exactly the same way you would about cheating in FPS video games. The red team always has the initiative and can win if they want to spend enough time and money.
It's a CLI that lets you select a movie, finds a matching stream from streaming websites, transcodes it, burns in subtitles in real time, and tells your TV to play it.
I tried with v1.4.1, TVs running Roku TV do not seem to be supported at this point of time, at least "castor scan" does not yield any results. Roku TV does support Apple AirPlay as an add-on as you probably know.
Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is a set of interoperability standards for sharing home digital media among multimedia devices. Introduced 2004; 22 years ago.
Google Cast is a proprietary protocol developed by Google for playing locally stored or Internet-streamed audiovisual content on a compatible consumer device. The protocol is used to initiate and control playback of content on digital media players, high-definition televisions, and home audio systems using a mobile device, personal computer, or smart speaker. The protocol was first launched on July 24, 2013; 12 years ago.
https://tvexplorer.live
It feels very light-weight, it's approximately instantly-responsive. Back button works. I don't understand the stats (or my contribution to them), but whatever.
(the closed-captioning pop-up causes some overlay issues for me, though)
moar edit: Upon further review with my very not-special desktop box, I'm reasonably confident that this is the quickest, most-responsive "TV-watching" experience I've had since analog NTSC left the scene ~eons ago. It's fast like switching from channel 11 to channel 13 used to be with the very quickest and most well-behaved of tuners.
What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing?
Seems to be the fact that there's no advertising, tracking or other SDKs and the entire JS is contained in two files.
Looks like Claude built it.
</sarcasm, mostly>
[1] - https://github.com/stupside/castor/commit/847abd1ad0dbe893fc...
What's the best way to use it, write your own search to parse all the json pages https://vsembed.ru/movies/latest/page-1.json ?
you lost me in there.
The checkbox is just a small part of what the checks are doing. It's monitoring everything the browser is doing and how the browser is responding to certain events up until you tick the checkbox, at which point it determines if you need one of those "are you human" challenges or if you can pass without interruption, based on how bot-like you are.
I would think of headless browser automation in exactly the same way you would about cheating in FPS video games. The red team always has the initiative and can win if they want to spend enough time and money.
> Apparently this just simulates clicking on the checkmark
Not just that. It also spoofs a bunch of browser stuff.
A standard headless browser will probably get flagged.
sources: - proxies: - "https://vidsrc-embed.ru" templates: movie: "/embed/movie/{itemID}" episode: "/embed/tv/{itemID}/{season}-{episode}"
Comparisons to watching tv, are usually a TV interface, with a TV device/app, be it an Android TV/Apple TV, etc.
Maybe I'm missing it, I couldn't see a tv interface.
The part where it can send video to any kind of tv is a pretty remarkable piece.