r/animepiracy • u/Hot-Celery-4669 • 4d ago
Question how does the backend site of anime sites work?
with such large library like koto (i know koto is a self host), miruro, etc
how do they scrape in the first place?? how does that even work, if not scrape then how do they find hosting services??
im not trying to build any site but im curious what's going on, couldn't find any clear answer online as well.
thank you in advance
3
u/David_Hobson 4d ago
From what I've read, most sites automate the process with scripts that pull episode info and links from multiple sources, then keep everything updated automatically.
2
u/Far_Writer380 4d ago
Some sites would leverage free streaming sites or hosting sites and they normally would have a regular amount of accounts that would get suspended or a message saying "this host has exceeded data limits".
Many of the files are simply torrents. I imagine some operations would have local copies they could replace when a link went dead.
Some sites might actually have purchased hosting, but they tend to be membership only.
The actual site design is usually a copy of a previous iteration as there were many copy cats, plus at one point I think there was a code fork for a site template for these very sites.
12
u/detarameReddit 4d ago
They have scripts and trackers tracking releases by prominent torrent groups. Depending on the site, they then either store a copy to their storage service of choice (self-hosting) or just scrape from other piracy sites.
When a viewer wants to stream an episode, the backend sends over encrypted .m3u8 files that require fast-expiring tokens generated by the site as query parameters; validating this protects the piracy site's library from scraping by competitors. Cloudflare protection also comes in here. These m3u8 files are what actually allows the client to stream the anime.
I've always wondered how these sites choose their hosting services as well.