Moviebox-API: Download Movies and TV Shows with Python

Smartwa — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 12:09:01 +0000

Moviebox-API is an unofficial Python wrapper for moviebox.ph. It lets you search, discover, and download movies, TV series, and subtitles directly from Python or through a command-line tool.

Features

Search and download movies, TV shows, and subtitles
Clean data modeling with Pydantic
Works with both async and sync operations
Comes with a simple CLI for non-developers

Installation

With CLI support:

pip install "moviebox-api[cli]"

For developers only:

pip install moviebox-api

Usage

Developers

Example:

from moviebox_api import MovieAuto
import asyncio

async def main():
    auto = MovieAuto()
    movie_file, subtitle_file = await auto.run("Avatar")
    print(movie_file.saved_to, subtitle_file.saved_to, sep="\n")

asyncio.run(main())

This downloads the movie and its subtitles automatically.

Command Line

Download a movie:

moviebox download-movie "Avatar"

Download a TV series episode:

moviebox download-series "Merlin" -s 1 -e 1

The CLI also supports quality selection, download directories, captions, and resuming interrupted downloads.

Notes

Shortcut: use moviebox instead of python -m moviebox_api.
To use a specific mirror host, set it with an environment variable:

  export MOVIEBOX_API_HOST="your-mirror-host.com"

Throttlebuster: Asynchronous Download Accelerator in Python

Smartwa — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 11:59:26 +0000

If you’ve ever wondered why your blazing-fast internet struggles with certain downloads, the answer is usually per-stream throttling. Many CDNs limit the speed of each individual request, but not your entire IP.

So while your browser might cap out at 2 MB/s, tools like IDM (Internet Download Manager) bypass this by opening multiple connections at once.

Now you can do the same in Python. Meet Throttlebuster — an async-first download accelerator that feels like IDM but is fully programmable.

Why Throttlebuster?

Concurrent downloads — split files into chunks and fetch them in parallel.
Fully async with sync support — integrates into modern async Python apps, or just works in quick scripts.
CLI ready — includes a command-line interface (tbust) out of the box.
Customizable — hooks for progress bars, retries, headers, proxies, etc.

Whether you’re working with large datasets, video files, or backups, Throttlebuster ensures you use all your bandwidth, not just a single throttled stream.

Installation

pip install "throttlebuster[cli]"

Developer Usage

Throttlebuster is flexible: you can run it synchronously for quick scripts, or asynchronously with full control.

Example 1: Synchronous Download

from throttlebuster import DownloadMode, ThrottleBuster

# Create instance with 10 parallel tasks
throttlebuster = ThrottleBuster(tasks=10)

# Run a blocking download
details = throttlebuster.run_sync(
    url="http://localhost:8888/miel-martin.webm",
    mode=DownloadMode.START
)

print(details)

Example 2: Asynchronous Download with Progress Hook

from throttlebuster import DownloadMode, DownloadTracker, ThrottleBuster

async def callback_function(data: DownloadTracker):
    percent = (data.downloaded_size / data.expected_size) * 100
    print(f"> Downloading {data.saved_to.name} {percent:.2f}%", end="\r")

async def main():
    throttlebuster = ThrottleBuster(tasks=2)
    return await throttlebuster.run(
        "http://localhost:8888/miel-martin.webm",
        progress_hook=callback_function,
        mode=DownloadMode.START
    )

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import asyncio
    details = asyncio.run(main())
    print(details)

CLI Usage

ThrottleBuster also ships with a CLI tool so you can accelerate downloads without writing Python code.

Check available commands:

$ python -m throttlebuster --help

You’ll see commands like:

download — Start a download with multiple parallel tasks.
estimate — Predict download duration with different task counts.

Download a File

$ python -m throttlebuster download http://localhost:8888/test.1.opus --tasks 14

or simply:

$ tbust download http://localhost:8888/test.1.opus --tasks 14

Here, --tasks 14 means the file will be split into 14 chunks, each downloaded concurrently.

Estimate Speeds

Want to see how much faster things get as you increase tasks?

$ python -m throttlebuster estimate --url http://localhost:8888/miel-martin.webm 260000

Example output:

       337.88 MB at 260.00 KB/s       
┏━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Tasks ┃ Duration   ┃ Load per task ┃
┡━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ 20    │ 1.08 Mins  │ 16.89 MB      │
│ 10    │ 2.17 Mins  │ 33.79 MB      │
│ 5     │ 4.33 Mins  │ 67.58 MB      │
│ 1     │ 21.66 Mins │ 337.88 MB     │
└───────┴────────────┴───────────────┘

This shows the speed-up effect of adding more concurrent tasks.

Takeaways

CDNs throttle per stream, not per IP.
Splitting downloads across multiple tasks bypasses this bottleneck.
Throttlebuster combines async Python with IDM-like acceleration.
Works both in code and as a CLI tool.

👉 Check it out on PyPI or GitHub.

#python #asyncio #downloader #opensource #cli #IDM

DEV Community: Smartwa

Moviebox-API: Download Movies and TV Shows with Python

Features

Installation

Usage

Developers

Command Line

Notes

Throttlebuster: Asynchronous Download Accelerator in Python

Why Throttlebuster?

Installation

Developer Usage

Example 1: Synchronous Download

Example 2: Asynchronous Download with Progress Hook

CLI Usage

Download a File

Estimate Speeds

Takeaways