What do people here think about the movie web app extension? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I guess most people know about the movie web app site, which pulls videos from various sources.

Recently they added a request to download an extension to your browser, for optimal perfomance and better quality.

It is featured on the firefox android extensions site from Mozilla, it has a github page. What I read online is that it seems the extension wants access to everything you do in your browser, which seems kind of sketchy.

What do people here think about it? Anyone installed it and can say more?

Edit: thanks for all the comments, looks like less people knew about this than I thought.

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[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 14 points 9 months ago

I don't know what you mean by the movie web app site, but yeah that extension does sound dodgy. "Optimal performance and better quality" sounds like something a spyware vendor would say to try and get people to download, I can't think of any valid technical reason a browser extension would enable functionality beyond that which the browser already has.

[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

Do you know what extensions are? They have extremely different use cases from websites themselves.

The obvious use case here and in most cases is to provide functionality that works with a variety of websites. I have no clue about this movie app stuff specifically but the extension might exist to allow you to view more data about a movie from a variety of websites such as imdb and rotten tomatoes.

[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 6 points 9 months ago

Recently they added a request to download an extension to your browser, for optimal perfomance and better quality.

Like I say, I don't know what site or service they're referring to, but this was the claim about what the extension was for.

I'm sure there could be an extension that checked IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes, but that doesn't seem to be what this is. Frankly, as a rule of thumb I wouldn't download any extension from a pirate streaming website.

[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Ah gotcha. Fair point

[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 3 points 9 months ago

While I agree with the bulk of your statement, I think this may need to be reworded, as the whole point of extensions is to do as you describe:

I can't think of any valid technical reason a browser extension would enable functionality beyond that which the browser already has.

I've tried rephrasing this in my head, and I think I get what you mean, but not sure.

[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah I know what you mean. I was mainly referring to the capability to play videos. Obviously, extensions enhance functionality, but they don't really make videos load quicker or in higher quality.

[-] stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 2 points 9 months ago

I don't think websites can do web scraping.

[-] anzo@programming.dev 1 points 9 months ago

Haven't you heard of search engines? ;p

[-] stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That's not the website doing web scraping, it's the server. This is likely the reason.

[-] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The movie-web addon needs quite a bit of permissions. [1]

Edit: If it actually needs access to many websites/domains it's better to set the permissions explicitly for each of them like MALSync does. [2]

This add-on needs to:

Block content on any page

Access browser tabs

Access your data for all websites

This add-on may also ask to:

Access your data for all websites

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/movie-web-extension/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mal-sync/

[-] Aatube@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago

Apparently it’s supposed to work on forks of the website too, hence “all websites “

[-] Anders429@programming.dev 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The problem they're addressing is that some sites they were scraping from have begun instituting measures to stop them. The site went from working beautifully to working barely at all, with most sources either loading incredibly slowly or failing to load at all. I followed the discussions a bit on their discord, and it seems like the first recommendation was for users to host their own proxies. From what I see on the site's initial splash, that still is one of the recommendations. I'm guessing they also rolled out the browser extension as an alternate method for users who don't want to set up a proxy, since they were getting tons of people on thsir discord complaining about it being too hard or whatever.

But yeah, who knows if the extension is safe. The project is open source, so you can always examine it for yourself. But at that point you may as well just host your own proxy.

Edit: looked into it a bit more; the extension's originally proposed purpose seems to be to get around CORS restrictions on certain sources. Seems the original proposal was here: https://github.com/movie-web/movie-web/issues/581

[-] anzo@programming.dev 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

You may want to install the extension on a alternate profile of your browser https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles , or use a fork (e.g. libre wolf) dedicated to using that website. I'd probably go with the latter because is less cumbersome. This way, your data or activities in the main browser/ profile is safe. That's assuming the only issue is about privacy and regarding those permissions.