March 13th, 2024
New
Improved
Fixed
Makes it so you cannot pause cached torrents. This is due to abuse from users pausing torrents and them being able to stay on the servers for longer. We previously didn't have any way to combat this, so users were able to keep a torrent paused, but on the download server taking up precious NVME and HDD space. This change was also made on the API side.
Improved SEO as the site has been getting hit by Google a lot recently.
New setting for Stremio Addon allows you to filter Adult content. This filters it from coming up in streams, or in search. This means, for example, if your kid clicks on some Adult content from another catalogue, streams won't show up. Same for search, if a search is supposed to return Adult results, it won't.
Default setting does not show adult content. No config needed. The only reason to change this setting is to show it. You dirty dog. (Not that TorBox has a lot of adult media anyways, but there is some).
New setting for webDAV. You can now flatten your folders, and only show the downloads inside. So if you previously were having to dive into your folders just to find a certain media, then no more!
This also now makes TorBox work with most webDAV clients such as Infuse. Apple TV users rejoice! (I recently purchased one and I love it, which is why this feature is here. On the topic of Infuse, Firecore, the parent company has the worst support and forum ever. Take a look at this discussion on the technical issue of why TorBox wasn't working previously with Infuse. Their team has no idea about anything technical it seems. Anyways...
Switched to a new scraping mechanism for torrents! We are now on a event based scraping system (which is what everyone else is doing for some reasons I will explain in a second). This means that as long as it is on a popular tracker, then it will show up. No more waiting for the scraper to find the movie or show you want. Along with this change the metadata engine got an update, giving more rich experiences when using the TorBox Stremio Addon.
To support this new scraping mechanism, the entire system has been redesigned from the ground up. Focusing on accuracy, speed, and reliability, there isn't one addon with more features than TorBox's.
There is a new search API that is open and free to use. You can check it out at https://search-api.torbox.app. It will be getting more updates in the future.
To use it use the /meta/source:id endpoint. To find Fight Club metadata, you would do /meta/imdb:tt0137523.
To find torrents, simply do the same thing with the /torrents/source:id endpoint. You can request metadata here by adding ?metadata=true to the request.
All endpoints are cached so if it has already been searched for, it will return a response in less than 100ms!
I plan to write about the journey for this and all of my recent discoveries creating TorBox here on Substack if you would like to tag along and possibly learn something.
Before, we were using a single Jackett instance for scraping. Now we are using about 10 instances of load balanced Jackett to be able to handle the sheer amount of requests we are getting through the Stremio Addon. Pair that with a rotating proxy, and we have been able to achieve around 5s searching for around 10-15 indexers per request.
Searching is just as fast as ever thanks to Meilisearch.
Metadata is extremely rich thanks to the combination of the IMDB and TMDB APIs for Movies and TV shows as well as the Jikan API for Anime.
Makes compatibility more accessible for other catalogs. For movies and TV shows, it isn't that wide of a range, you can search by IMDB and TMDB ID's. If you want to make your catalog compatible, make sure you add your source ahead of the ID, like imdb:id, or imdb_id:id, or another variation, and TorBox will be able to find it. For anime, it is similar but you can use even more sources such as mal_id:id, mal:id, anilist:id, kitsu:id, kitsu-id:id, kitsu_id:id, and all other anime database sources.
Enhanced reliability. Recently, some of our core servers have been going down, and due to the reliance the API has on those servers, it would crash the API making it inaccessible for some time, making it inaccessible to users who need to use the API for other purposes. Now, a downed server will not affect the API, and if you try to use a downed server it will let you know there are connection issues to core servers, and they will be back online soon.
To fight the issue of core servers going down, we are switching providers to one that won't let this happen anymore.