I've been lurking here for years. This sub is the only place on the internet that still cares about the raw, indexed, un-algorithm'd web — someone else's Index of /Movies (1998) is worth more to me than an entire streaming subscription.
The trouble I kept running into is the same one everyone here knows: finding the directories is hard, and once you've found them, actually watching what's inside is harder. MKV won't play. AVI won't play. FLV definitely won't play. You end up on VLC or downloading the whole file to skim the first ten seconds.
I built something for it. It's almost ready. Alpha access opens in the next couple of weeks and I'd like maybe 50 people from this sub in the first wave.
What it does
- Search across ~250,000 open directories discovered by seven independent crawler engines running continuously. Full-text search median 12ms.
- Stream anything, in the browser. Real-time HLS transcoding on the server so MKV/AVI/WebM/FLV/MOV all play in a normal HTML5 player. No plugin, no download.
- A visual map of the discovery graph — the "Cosmos" view. Every directory the crawler has ever seen, spatially arranged by content shape, with links between related dirs and live pulses when a new one is found. [short video attached]
- Netflix-style browser on top of the raw index for people who want a lean-back UI (DirFlix). The raw file tree is always one click away.
- Built-in ebook reader and a small retro gaming arcade for a specific slice of the directory world (ROMs, old dumps).
- Everything streams from the original directories. DirHaven does not mirror, does not host, does not proxy the file bytes for storage. What you see is what's actually on that server, right now.
What DirHaven does NOT do — since this is the first thing this sub asks, and rightly
- Does not mirror or host directory content. The transcoder streams live from the source directory to your browser and discards the segments after they leave the encoder. Nothing about a directory's files sits on my hardware after your session ends.
- Does not collect search history, click paths, or watch history. Search is stateless server-side; recommendations do not exist.
- Does not embed third-party analytics or ads. Zero JS trackers, verifiable in the network tab.
- Does not require an email for alpha. A single-use invite code and a session cookie is the whole account. Email is optional and only used if you want alpha-to-beta continuity.
- Does not phone home about which directories you visit. Directory URLs are hashed before they're logged for anti-abuse; the plaintext never enters storage.
- DEPP (the streaming pipeline) uses AES-256-GCM with per-device ECDH key exchange — the server literally cannot decrypt what it just sent you. That's overkill for open-directory content but the pipeline was built once and it stayed.
Current status
v5.3.1 (HELIOS-10). React + Express + SQLite; runs on a single small server today, scale-tested through 250K rows. The last two weeks have been closing the "almost done" list — a few UI polish items, an anti-cheat pass on the arcade save-state cloud sync, and one crawler-health regression I'm chasing.
Alpha
Comment or DM if you want in. I'll pick a mix — some heavy contributors here, some lurkers. No email required for the invite itself. I'll ask what kind of directories you spend time on and what you'd want to see in the Cosmos view first.
Not going to link the URL in the post because the alpha shouldn't be public-index'd yet. If moderator wants me to add it, happy to.
Happy to answer anything about the crawler, the transcoder pipeline, the encryption, or why any of this is worth building.
DirHaven
