Another tool in the war on anti-piracy is torrext, a free torrent metadata service.

How it works is you upload a torrent to it, or provide a URL to a torrent on say mininova, and torrext will extract the data from the torrent file and save it to a page under the torrents info_hash.

The data it extracts looks to be the created date, comment, and the files in the torrent. If it was uploaded to torrext via a URL from mininova it will provide the link to the torrent file as well. Plus because the info_hash is unique to every torrent, you can add a URL for a torrent from thepiratebay, mininova and torrage and it will add the download links for each site. REDUNDANCY!

The best thing is, the site hosts no torrents, no trackers, and the database isn’t searchable.

Except by Google. Because they have the most recent torrent URLs listed on the main page the Google spider can access and index torrent data that is on torrext. So if you wanted to search for a torrent on torrext you can use google… like so:

Video files? “.avi” site:torrext.appspot.com
ISO files? “.iso” site:torrext.appspot.com
Videos of Megan Fox? “megan fox” “.avi” site:torrext.appspot.com
How bout EZTV releases? “EZTV” site:torrext.appspot.com
Liberal talk shows? (”the daily show”|”the colbert report”) site:torrext.appspot.com

Google has indexed all the files in the torrent data it finds on torrext so in a way its a bit better. However it does not show the number of seeders or leechers – but I may make a script to scrape the trackers to tell you. Watch this space.

Reading about the stink the MPAA and RIAA are kicking up about the whole P2P bittorrent thing got me thinking. I wonder if what they are saying is actually true. Are movie makers actually being ripped off by bittorrent?

I found this website called The Numbers which has a whole lot of box office data on it.

However no API. And I wanted an API that would tell me whether to feel guilty about downloading a particular movie.

So I made this: Box Office Data API

You just have to enter the movie name and year (in the url bar – no form yet) and it will tell you (if the data is available) the production costs, the gross revenue, and the net profit the movie makers made.

Here’s an example for the movie District 9 also if you look at Titanic they made over 1.5 billion bucks profit on that piece of shit movie!

The search code isn’t very smart though so it may return some dodgey results. Still beta but still useful.