fix: replace anidb with hianime provider by U-L-M-S · Pull Request #1897 · pystardust/ani-cli

U-L-M-S · 2026-09-06T22:22:38Z

Swaps the dead anidb.app for hianime.at.

Credit

All the hard part — the hianime endpoints, the HD-1 embed, the XOR deobfuscation — is @Dhairya3391's from #1894. They're co-author on the commit. External .vtt handling was @Tsagar3's idea in that thread.

@port19x said #1894 was too big to review, so i redid it on master as a smaller diff (+82/−62 instead of +191/−58) and fixed what broke while testing.

Bugs I hit and fixed

Search also returned the "Top 10" sidebar — same markup, so ~30 junk results every time, and No results found! never fired.
Greedy regex picked the last subtitle track. AoT ep 1 has five, all tagged english, last one is Spanish.
--skip got an empty MAL id — it was set in a subshell and never made it out.
Old 5.0.x history played the wrong anime. The ids look alike, so attack-on-titan-1 offered AoT ep 6 and played One Piece ep 6, then saved that. Every one upgrading hits this on their first -c.
IINA and VLC choked on a subtitle URL (mpv splits on :, VLC rewrites it to file://). Fixed with escaped colons and :input-slave=.
CI was red.

Cleanup

hianime_m3u8 sets its variables directly instead of printing — no more temp files, no local .vtt, no rm -f scattered arround. refr comes from the embed URL instead of being hardcoded ten times. Dropped hianime_desc (hianime has no seasons block, it was returning genres), the HD-2 fallback and an unused header.

Tested

shellcheck and shfmt clean. Sub, dub, -r, -c, --skip on bash, busybox ash and bash --posix. mpv, yt-dlp and ffmpeg all play, and all 403 without the referer.

Caveats

Android intents, catt and iSH cant send a Referer, so they can't use this provider. Same in fix: temp-fix #1894, nothing the script can do.
IINA/VLC flags come from reading their source — i don't have a Mac. Would love a confirmation.
hianime only serves 1080p, so -q mostly falls back to best. Documented.
Pre-existing: ${_response##* } is quadratic in zsh, so the episode list crawls there. Fine on a real /bin/sh.

Closes #1894 if you prefer this shape, otherwise cherry-pick it there.

anidb.app is offline, so scrape hianime.at instead: the search page, the episode and server list endpoints, the HD-1 embed whose config is base64(json XOR "otaku-embed-v1"), and finally the master playlist. Builds on the scraping work in pystardust#1894. - hianime_m3u8 runs in the parent shell and sets links, sub_link, mal_id and refr, so ani-skip now runs after get_video_link with a real mal id - the stream host rejects playlists without a referer, pass it to mpv, iina, vlc, syncplay, yt-dlp and ffmpeg - subtitles come as a separate vtt, hand it to the players and save it next to downloads - hianime has no season list, so change_season searches the current title - scope the episode list to the selected slug, otherwise ids left over from the previous provider resolve to an unrelated show - cut the top 10 sidebar out of the search results - create the temp history file before backup_old_hist appends to it - bump to 5.1.0 and update readme, man page, disclaimer and hacking notes Co-authored-by: Dhairya3391 <dhairyaadroja3391@gmail.com>

madeline-celeste · 2026-09-07T12:44:07Z

gpt pr description

U-L-M-S · 2026-09-08T06:32:24Z

gpt pr description

Bro... just trust the process 😉

port19x · 2026-09-08T09:08:31Z

@U-L-M-S gpt code is nice, but I'll be real, I'm not reading the text wall that is the PR description, at that point its easier for me to read the code.
As a rule of thumb, let the machine generate what is for the machine and write yourself what should be read by a human.

To quote Jesus

“Teacher, we know that you are honest and don’t defer to anyone; for you aren’t partial to anyone, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Shall we give, or shall we not give?”

But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said, “Why do you test me? Bring me a denarius, that I may see it.” They brought it, and he asked, “Whose is this image and inscription?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” They marveled greatly at him.

— Mark 12:14–17 (WEB)

U-L-M-S · 2026-09-08T09:17:34Z

@U-L-M-S gpt code is nice, but I'll be real, I'm not reading the text wall that is the PR description, at that point its easier for me to read the code. As a rule of thumb, let the machine generate what is for the machine and write yourself what should be read by a human.

To quote Jesus

“Teacher, we know that you are honest and don’t defer to anyone; for you aren’t partial to anyone, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Shall we give, or shall we not give?”
But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said, “Why do you test me? Bring me a denarius, that I may see it.” They brought it, and he asked, “Whose is this image and inscription?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” They marveled greatly at him.
— Mark 12:14–17 (WEB)

I rewriten the PR myself I hope it's cleaerer / better to read now.

I used Fable 5.1 btw fro the changes

WindowsOmega · 2026-09-08T16:35:37Z

With "HD-1" set in line 213, it results in No sources found for sub! (#1893). Set it to "ZokoAnime" to fix it.

hianime reassigned the HD-1 label to a megaplay embed the deobfuscator cannot read, which made sub and dub both fail with no sources found.

The site lists several languages and marks the english one as default, so select by that flag instead of taking the first entry; the docs also lose the single-1080p claim now that episodes serve several resolutions.

U-L-M-S · 2026-09-08T22:15:23Z

With "HD-1" set in line 213, it results in No sources found for sub! (#1893). Set it to "ZokoAnime" to fix it.

Good catch ! Thanks ;) hianime moved "HD-1" to a different player. I siwtched it to ZokoAnime

port19x · 2026-09-09T08:23:48Z

Thx @U-L-M-S,
juicy Fable 5.1 credits being spent here, I'm more of a GPT-6 guy this month

madeline-celeste · 2026-09-09T19:24:31Z

people used to write code 🥹

port19x · 2026-09-09T20:33:41Z

port19x

The non-code bumps to the new links are good with one exception.
As for the code, season handling is an artifact of an anidb idiosyncracy.
I'll look into a principled solution to it.

port19x

Overall the code is in impressively good shape for a model.
Respect to both the prompting @U-L-M-S and on the timing, we get fable 5.1 pre-lobotomy (/pre-quantization) here.
This might be the first time I actually largely like the comments on AI code.

I did read all changes and will give it another pass later today.
I'll also let astra have a look now, though apparently it got nerfed last night so might not be high quality what it tells me.

port19x · 2026-09-11T09:33:26Z

@U-L-M-S / @claude Android referrer support was introduced / documented in #1704 and removed in #1830.
Should be easy to get back with those two as context.
As for iOS, this may be a regression we have to accept for this version.
@CoolnsX had sth to say on it in 2025: link

Co-authored-by: Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> Co-authored-by: GPT 6 Astra <codex@openai.com>

Co-authored-by: GPT 6 Astra <codex@openai.com>

port19x

Can we get Android to work before a merge?
I gave some pointers above

port19x · 2026-09-11T10:22:40Z

@U-L-M-S I'll be hands off during my lunch break now, you're clear to have at it with fable again

U-L-M-S · 2026-09-11T10:25:16Z

Can we get Android to work before a merge? I gave some pointers above

It seens possible. I would like to test it first to be 100% sure.
But I'm not home yet... at 19:00 (MESZ) I'll be home and so I can test everything to be 100% sure.

U-L-M-S requested review from Derisis13, justchokingaround and port19x as code owners September 6, 2026 22:22

barracuda156 mentioned this pull request Sep 8, 2026

Anidb is temporarily down, we should have a better error message #1893

Open

U-L-M-S added 2 commits September 9, 2026 00:02

Select the ZokoAnime server on hianime

a4d44f9

hianime reassigned the HD-1 label to a megaplay embed the deobfuscator cannot read, which made sub and dub both fail with no sources found.

Pick the default subtitle track

1a99bbf

The site lists several languages and marks the english one as default, so select by that flag instead of taking the first entry; the docs also lose the single-1080p claim now that episodes serve several resolutions.

port19x reviewed Sep 11, 2026

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Comment thread ani-cli.1 Outdated

port19x requested changes Sep 11, 2026

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Comment thread ani-cli

port19x and others added 5 commits September 11, 2026 11:34

docs: still list explicit resolutions in man page

54c828f

refactor: add referrer to subtitle download within download function

b858036

Co-authored-by: Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> Co-authored-by: GPT 6 Astra <codex@openai.com>

refactor: remove redundant change_season workaround

e85114f

Co-authored-by: GPT 6 Astra <codex@openai.com>

refactor: omit now redundant canon_ep_no workaround

2fe7756

Co-authored-by: GPT 6 Astra <codex@openai.com>

docs: update platform support indication through color

67b46ef

U-L-M-S requested a review from port19x September 11, 2026 10:21

port19x reviewed Sep 11, 2026

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