A malicious video file exploiting your video player is possible, but extremely unlikely. Keep your system up to date and you'll be fine.

if you download Boy and the Heron but end up watching Fight Club, you know they can’t be trusted

lol. What? You have a link to article or some proof of a video file as an attack vector for a hacker? Video files aren’t executable and even if there was a way to cause some type of malware to be ran from it the file it would have to be coded explicitly for the video player/system running it.

My guess that if this was a legit attack vector that all the latest movies and big popular tv shows would be targeted and we would hear a lot of stories about it.

You’re on Linux which gives you a huge leg up on not being target by a virus. Just chill and watch your movie.

IGG-Games is uploading csrinru cracked games on their own website. In the past they have distributed malware on this way.

The admin is not based and a fucking mf

1. You're either going to trust random people on the Internet on 1337x.to or here on Lemmy instances. It's all a crapshoot.
2. The people complaining about 1337x.to and IGGGAMES seem to be super purists or unable to grasp that IGGGAMES is made up of many people and certain people in the past (years ago) did shady (shadier) things by uploading games with unwanted extras (crypto miner and other things).
3. There are plenty of people that like 1337x.to and feel it's safe. Safe enough. Nothing is safe, even companies will slip in malware if they think they can get away with it. There is no safe computer.
4. Comments on 1337x.to are rare and rarely have anything important to say. At least there is no advertisement spam comments.

I wouldn't worry about this unless it's a game or software, and even then, the non-pirated version probably has DRM that's somehow worse than malware.

Now if your video file ends up being a password protected rar and you don't already know the password, just delete it and find another video torrent.

Thanks for reminding me of this possibility.

Here’s how I plan to solve it on my seedbox:

In the bash script I use to download and rename files using filebot, I added an mkvalidator step at the beginning. If the file doesn’t pass the check, it doesn’t go onto the next step.

mkvalidator

mkvalidator is a simple command line tool to verify Matroska and WebM files for spec conformance. It checks the various bogus or missing key elements against the EBML DocType version of the file and reports the errors/warnings in the command line.

I only use vlc or notepad to open things from torrent sites. I don't pirate games or software anymore.

Does the torrent listing have any comments? Ofc positive comments doesn't guarantee it's not malware but I wouldn't chance it if there's no comments

I thought it was understood that 1337 is about as fucked as the bay? Private Russian trackers are universally the way to go, but there's still better resources outside of that on the reddit megathread

I have downloaded several TV shows and movies from this uploader and had no issues AFAIK. But make sure to scan this before opening with any player.