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Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly
- ihuman 13y agoDiscussion about Time's article on this piece of software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377089
- bicx 13y agoThis is pretty much illegal in the U.S., right?
- rickyc091 13y agoYep, is it actually legal any where?
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoIt's a gray area in lots of countries, although typically they tend to have much greater issues than some very low income worker trying to find escape in torrenting films.
- doze 13y agoSwitzerland
- MaxGfeller 13y agoActually it's also illegal in Switzerland, as it includes the uploading of the movie. However, there has never been a verdict on this.
- sergiotapia 13y agoSouth America.
- gambiting 13y agoIn Poland you can download anything for your own private use - so this would be completely legal.
- kcbanner 13y agoThis is a torrent client, and uploads while you watch.
- gambiting 13y agoYou can disable uploading, for the sake of legality.
- jonathansizz 13y agoSo then you'd be parasitizing the parasites. I like it (gives them a taste of their own medicine).
- mcv 13y agoWell, the downloading is legal in Netherland (we already pay a fee for that). The uploading not so much. Not sure if it matters that you only upload what you downloaded, so you aren't distributing anything that wasn't already distributed.
- userbinator 13y agoNot if you watch public-domain movies with it.
- icebraining 13y agoOr CC licensed ones: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Films http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Films
- csmattryder 13y agouTorrent has a similar function [1], but from what I've heard, it's spotty at best. It's rare that you'll get enough of the packets at the right places to get a coherent stream going. Especially if you haven't told it to stream from the start of the torrent. Gonna be interesting to see how this goes, same concept or some cool tech in the background like S3? [1] http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3#faq1 http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3#faq1
- henryaj 13y agoIsn't it also thought that this kind of sequential torrenting is bad for the swarm's health?
- zanny 13y agoI've always thought of how revolutionary it would be to have some kind of video hosting site where you distributed encrypted content throughout the users in fragments. When you would be using the client it would always be broadcasting to others, but you could enable or disable a background daemon to do it throughout the day. You could have it "smart allocate" the video cache, and it would keep local your favorites and could pull down your "watch later" videos in advance. It could buffer episode 2 when you are watching episode 1, etc. I can't think of another way to democratize youtube - the costs of storing and broadcasting petabytes of videos are astronomical, but I think torrenting proves there is a lot of untapped bandwidth in the world you could take advantage of if you mask it over with a nice GUI. I guess that is the real downside of such an idea - it can't work in the browser, unless you implement a torrent client in javascript, and even then you couldn't maintain a local cache.
- adrianm 13y agoWhy couldn't you maintain a local cache with JavaScript? Chrome and Opera already support the Filesystem API and it's only a matter of time before it ceases to be a working draft. But even discounting that API (which allows you to set a user authorized storage limit your application has read/write access to) there are already ways to cache > 5 MB of data in the browser; they're just hacks at this point.
- captainmuon 13y agoThere should really be a version of this using files stored on sharehosters, like what you can find on serienjunkies.de . There is basically zero legal risk when using those.
- prot 13y agoThis looks very interesting. It works quite well, on Linux as well. This technology could actually be used for legal purposes too, lowering the price of content - if content providers really wanted to.
- middleclick 13y agoIs this legal in Canada? Because this constitutes streaming and not uploading, so it should be legal?
- vrikis 13y agoI haven't look at the technical details, but it does use Bittorrent, so you're most likely peering and seeding to other users too.
- rvschuilenburg 13y agoYep. You're definitely also uploading.
- nikolak 13y agoThis is not streaming, this is just torrenting and it includes uploading. The only difference between this and other torrent clients is that it downloads torrent files sequentially by default and opens the file as soon as you have enough data to start watching. From the FAQ: Popcorn Time works using torrents, fair enough. Am I seeding while watching a movie? Indeed, you are. You're going to be uploading bits and bits of the movie for as long as you're watching it on Popcorn Time. http://getpopcornti.me/faq http://getpopcornti.me/faq
- zanny 13y agoThis is what (sadly) puts a hole in the concept. Because most of the tyrant ISPs don't provide symmetric connections, you are never going to maintain a 1.0 ratio throughout a viewing, so you depend on seed boxes to keep the download demands from crippling popular videos. Unless they add a daemon option to keep seeding when not using the app, users are always leechers.
- shawabawa3 13y agoNot necessarily. It doesn't matter how much faster your download speed is as long as your upload speed is fast enough to "reverse stream". i.e. for a 700mb 1h40 movie your upload speed needs to be ~120kB/s, which most people have now (at least in the UK)
- 3327 13y agoi think this community is the last place for this. I have the sense most people can figure out a torrent download and get it running. Weren't people actually able to download files and open the in the early 2000? OR has that become a resume skill too ? "Can download and run files"
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jmclean 13y agoI think the point is that what was formerly a file-oriented task now behaves much more like a service. Netflix would be nowhere near as popular if you had to download the movie file before watching. Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.
- bertil 13y agoThis community is about making widely used product, and pushing boundaries; ease of use and torrenting are absolutely part of that. Say: it is acceptable that the software torrents out without the user’s knowledge? How are the files architectured to allow fast start? Is there a way to improve the experience by preloading some? How is this coming to affect how Netflix positions itself? Can this mean that content can be disintermediated a little more, and could something, say a documentary that wouldn’t fit on YouTube (say, because it includes violence, or suspected espionnage) and wouldn’t be able to be produced by common producers would still be able to reach an audience and critical success? There has been many attempts at making torrents more user-friendly, and this is an interesting example.
- sergiotapia 13y agoDisagree COMPLETELY. I can waste time hunting down the file I need, or someone can build something fantastic to use. Hell, when I was a youngin' I wrote FastFlick to make MY life easier. We as hackers are always striving to make things simpler for everyone, but most importantly for ourselves. http://fastflick.blogspot.com/ http://fastflick.blogspot.com/
- 13y ago
- alg0rith 13y ago>YIFY torrents Why bother.
- steeve 13y agoCheck this then http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736 http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736
- dansku 13y agoIf you watch from a small screen it's not that bad!
- Ziron 13y agoYeah, considering the terrible quality of YIFY's movie rips I wouldn't see this as being competitive with legal alternatives at all. All the audio is low bitrate stereo, and the 1080p video never goes above 2500 kbps. The second there is any motion the entire thing falls apart into a blocky mess. Such low bitrates do make it easy to stream, but I don't think the site is correct in saying you are watching "the best quality".
- steeve 13y agoXBMCtorrent has other providers (such as Kickass). http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736 http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736
- 1stop 13y agoThe west finally caught up to china (PPS).
- robogrowth 13y agoCan i beam this with chromecast?
- viiralvx 13y agoNope, but there is a pull request for Chromecast support. I hear the Chromecast SDK is still a bit buggy, though.
- kekumu 13y agoAs long as the video is in a supported format you should be able to: http://bolivar.tumblr.com/post/79222932441/popcorn-time-chromecast http://bolivar.tumblr.com/post/79222932441/popcorn-time-chro...
- snippyhollow 13y agoXBMC torrent has been out there for a while http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736 http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736 It's free software https://github.com/steeve/xbmctorrent https://github.com/steeve/xbmctorrent and uses libtorrent-rasterbar through https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent-go https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent-go
- jcutrell 13y agoCame to the thread to mention this. It's super cool, although sometimes it drops my seeders to 0 without explanation. And only on my rPi.
- steeve 13y agoMost likely your SD card is full. This can happen on some installs like OpenELEC which don't use the whole SD card.
- manojlds 13y agoEven utorrent has the stream feature.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- steeve 13y agoJust in case, I started a new HN thread here[1]. Disclosure: I'm the author. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379166
- laacz 13y agoYes, but this one aims for nice interface and simplicity - install and start watching. For people who are not tech savy this app will win.
- Touche 13y ago
- _tb 13y agoThis was made here in Argentina, we don't think that much of legal issues here.
- sergiotapia 13y agoExactly, good luck to the RIAA goons trying to mess with South Americans.
- w1ntermute 13y agoThey can just pay off the politicians to throw the developers in jail.
- slashdotaccount 13y ago<joke>Or bring some democracy.</joke>
- whitef0x 13y agoAlthough I do support (legal) torrenting, I wonder whether one can trust this applications considering the high risk of malware packaged with this application coming out of this community. Having said that, I do not know of the developers/people behind this project, so please do not take offense at this if this is misdirected and/or wrong.
- VMG 13y agoSeems to be open-source: https://github.com/popcorn-time https://github.com/popcorn-time
- gabriel34 13y agoStream for torrents is extremely damaging to the swarm, specially for new torrents. It breaks the protocol and may end up killing itself. Picture a case of major success for this: At Prime Time there is a rush of people streaming from a torrent, acquiring the same pieces of the torrent without servers to counterbalance the upload speed of people with the complete files can't stream the file in real time to a few people who in their turn can't replicate it fast enough to lots of people.
- epaladin 13y agoIt sounds like there is demand for a p2p system for distributed streaming, but breaking BT doesn't sound like a nice way of achieving that.
- hrjet 13y agoPrime time is time-zone dependent.
- wpietri 13y agoDo you have a demonstration of that effect? I'm not buying it from the words. With typical torrent use, you have to wait the entire download time before you can watch anything because the pieces are randomly selected. But adding streaming just means you have to bias toward the early pieces just enough to have a decent buffer. After that, you can still be random. The case of prime time seems to be better for this approach, not worse. People still won't all start at the exact same time. The early arrivals will all replicate the early pieces, beefing up the ability of the swarm to get the pieces everybody wants. I haven't looked at the code, but it seems to me that as long as it's flexible about the amount of time it takes to fill its initial buffer, and as long as it keeps serving after people are done watching (to compensate for the up/down pipe asymmetry), then the swarm would survive just fine. Indeed, I think making swarm participation much easier and more appealing might increase the depth of resources around any given torrent, making results net better for popular files.
- gabriel34 13y agoNo, I don't have a demonstration since nothing like this was ever widely adopted, but it is an opinion shared among the bittorrent community: "One of the key algorithms in bittorrent is the rarest-first piece picker. It is vital to bittorrent’s performance that the piece picker fulfills both of these requirements: The rarest piece is picked (from the client’s point of view of the swarm) If two or more pieces have the same rarity, pick one of them at random The reason to pick a random rarest piece is to always strive towards evening out the piece distribution in the swarm. Having an even piece distribution improves peers’ ability to trade pieces and improves the swarm’s tolerance to peers leaving." http://blog.libtorrent.org/2011/11/writing-a-fast-piece-picker/ http://blog.libtorrent.org/2011/11/writing-a-fast-piece-pick...
- clienthunter 13y agoThis seems waaaaaayyy too polished in all respects for an app designed to break the law. I would not be at all surprised if those prebuilt binaries were sending your details off to the MPAA.
- watty 13y agoThe MPAA already has the ability to view torrent seeds, why would they waste so much resources to create this?
- qiemem 13y agoHoneypot, but that doesn't hold up since torrenting movies is so wide spread already.
- throwwit 13y agoBut just in time for TPP deliberations.
- clienthunter 13y agoBinary blobs running on user boxes can collect direct, identifiable, evidence. Spying an IP address from afar that may or may not be proxied/NAT'd is flimsy circumstantial evidence at best.
- quadrangle 13y agoWouldn't be a legal defense, but can we say ENTRAPMENT?? That would be the MPAA actively encouraging infringement in order to then attack the infringers.
- d23 13y ago> Downloading copyrighted material may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk. Have we seriously just stopped considering the ethical implications of such things? At least these sorts of sites used to pretend they were for things like "public domain movies" and "personal backups."
- kzrdude 13y agoYouTube has established a huge gray zone though! So much of the material I watch there is not actually uploaded with permission.
- res0nat0r 13y agoAnd youtube has a sophisticated detection system setup that scans uploads for copyrighted content automatically. I'm thinking with the press this app is getting they are going to be forced to do something similar and block illegal content, or take it offline soon.
- malka 13y agothis is free software. Even if they did that, someone would fork it to bring back the illegal content.
- res0nat0r 13y agoThere is a lot of free software out there that its primary goal is to facilitate copyright infringement, I guess it is just up to the court or whomever to decide if that is the case, and worth pursuing taking it down. (Not saying that the effort could be put in for this case, but just a possibility)...
- kzrdude 13y agoBut it requires copyright holders to be part of it. Most are not, and most can not.
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- humanfromearth 13y agoIf you look at this file here: https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/blob/master/js/tracking.js https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/blob/master/js/t... It sends usage data to Google Analytics. I can see how this can translate into you getting caught. Be careful. Even if you don't have a 'trackingId' set it still sends GET requests to http://google.com/ http://google.com/
- MatthewPhillips 13y agoAdd this to your /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
- humanfromearth 13y agoAnd google.com too?
- dubcanada 13y agoTake it out. Node-webkit is just a bunch of JS files, just go to that directory and remove it then continue on with your day.
- MatthewPhillips 13y agoWhat danger are GET requests to google.com?
- valarauca1 13y agoWebsockets to google.com can be opened by iframes in your browsing to report your internet usage for google advertisements. Naturally this will also block you using google. Its more of drastic stop tracking me measurement.
- ry0ohki 13y agoNoooooooooo (An analytics junkie)
- bolonomicz 13y agofucking awesome
- hershel 13y agoI think if this idea of equivalence between paid and pirated content is taken to it's logical extreme, the result will be less movies being produced. Maybe it's preferable to keep it as is today: piracy as an option for some and as a force against too much control from the content industry.
- slashdotaccount 13y agoHollywood studios (should) make their money in cinemas, before the DVD/BlueRay release. CAMRips are not really competitors.
- jwcrux 13y agoMany of the movies people torrent are new releases so that they don't have to pay the high price of going to the cinema to see it.
- slashdotaccount 13y agoWhat I'm saying is that the new movies are not available in DVDs so there are no quality pirate releases (only unwatchable camera rips) unless there is a leaked copy of the movie (very rare).
- unknownian 13y agoNew movies get DVDs for special screenings or for the Academy.
- Morphling 13y agoI have no idea what kind of money companies get from DVDs, but if we where to go to a world where I would have to go to cinema to see every movie I'm interested in then I'd just stay home and watch horrible Cam rips. I have no desire to go to cinema and pay ridiculous amounts of money for movie tickets and whatever shit they are passing as food these days, I want to stay home and enjoy the movie not listen as some kids giggle next to me.
- jokoon 13y agowould not be surprised if people would start getting caught using this app. I don't think the app really is useful when you weighs the risks.
- dpweb 13y agoPublic domain movies. Ya.. Be careful and all that when they're not, you're not just consuming copyrighted works you are distributing them.
- slashdotaccount 13y agoWe need an onion protocol for the torrents: you -> [encrypted data] proxy peer -> destination peer In this case, unless all the proxy and the destination peers are controlled by policing actors they can't know who's downloading what.
- gnur 13y agoExcept this will result in massive bandwith charges for all nodes included.
- caioariede 13y agoIs there a way to stream it over DLNA?
- nextstep 13y agoThis app is fantastic. It really is a huge win for usability. I downloaded the app and was watching "12 Years a Slave" in less than 30 seconds. I hope they add TV shows with a nice interface for browsing seasons.
- alexose 13y agoIf you're interested in node, I highly recommend poking around the source files. Pretty amazing what's possible in a small amount of code. While the frontend is all Backbone, the real magic happens in its backend dependencies like peerflix (https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix) and video.js (https://github.com/videojs/video.js/ https://github.com/videojs/video.js/). Edit: And, of course, the remarkable (undocumented?) API provided by subapi.com. Check out http://subapi.com/popular.json http://subapi.com/popular.json ! Double Edit: The API appears to be developed by the Popcorn Time people, as per https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/issues/294 https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/issues/294
- fenghorn 13y agoPopcorn Time 0.1.0 depends on subapi.com to continue functioning. Based on the source the API returns JSON file with the following structure: { movies: { [ torrents: [ {'quality': '1080p', url: 'http://url.torrent' http://url.torrent'}, {'quality': '720p', url: 'http://url.torrent' http://url.torrent'}, {'quality': 'undefined', url: 'http://url.torrent' http://url.torrent'} ], subtitles: [ {'language': 'en', url: 'http://url.srt' http://url.srt'}, {'language': 'undefined', url: 'http://url.srt' http://url.srt'} ], imdb_id:, title:, year:, runtime:, synopsis:, voteAverage:, poster:, backdrop:, seeders:, leechers: ] } }
- quasque 13y agoSeems somewhat unethical to release something that is essentially designed for piracy.
- wernercd 13y agoIs it less ethical than corporations lead by "the man" that refuses to use new technology for fear of not being able to wring every drop of profit out of people? Look at staggered releases of Movie/DVD/rentals/redbox and the fake scarcity to protect profits. I know companies need profit... but on the same time, if it really is THAT easy to get movies to people - then it's time for a shakeup that moves the industry forward. MP3s and napster led to iTunes and other avenues to get music easily AND "Support the Artist". Maybe we'll get better options out this - other than Netflix (Which I love, but damn it doesn't have a lot of titles) or pick-your-flavor digital locker that may or may not exist next year?
- OlivierLi 13y agoI think you mean redbox.
- wernercd 13y agoWoops... Freudian slip. Thank you.
- quasque 13y agoMovies and music are a luxury item, not an essential. So it is very difficult to construct an ethical argument that supports piracy of newly released works, as there is basically negligible harm to the consumer in not receiving such items for free. (Compare this to, for example, patents on medical products being used to induce scarcity. The stakes here are life and death - so there is a strong ethical case in favour of ignoring the patents to produce cheaper generic products so they can be supplied to those who would otherwise be unable to pay. As has been done with certain drugs in the developing world.)
- 13y ago
- cheez 13y agoI clicked "12 years a slave", a movie I have not yet had an opportunity to watch and it started streaming in less than a minute in high quality. I immediately quit the application as it should not be so easy to benefit from someone else's hard work without compensating them. Please, movie people, let me pay for this. You might kill the cinemas, but you'll still get paid.
- slashdotaccount 13y agoWould you continue watching it if you had an unused ticket for that movie?
- cheez 13y agoAccidentally? Yes. When I'm at work, I only watch TV as background noise. I rarely get a chance to go to the movies proper nor do I get the time to sit and watch a movie at home. This is the only reason I have Netflix. This is specific to me and I wouldn't claim to generalize this to a whole population.
- quadrangle 13y ago> it should not be so easy to benefit from someone else's hard work without compensating them. Nonsense. I benefit from the work of Mozart and feel no need to compensate anyone. There are real issues with funding mechanisms and creative work in a shareable digital world, but we can reject the idea that you should always pay for anything that is beneficial. If you want to give gifts to creative folks you like, you can go ahead.
- minikites 13y agoThe musicians/recording engineers/conductor/support staff don't deserve to be paid?
- meerita 13y agoWell, this is a big debate. I think musicians must be paid by playing live, amd not when every human listen a song, do a cover, or listen it in a bar. I think artists should be credited and pay when others use their creation for commercial use. Staff, as always, they will have jobs. You think the staff is all day working with the records, no, they do sound work on live shows too, as welll producers, designers, print guys, etc. People evolve.
- DevX101 13y agoCan someone confirm that the .exe I download is the compiled version of the github repo?
- shanusmagnus 13y agoOn a similar topic, years ago I used to download video from Chrome, and as it was downloading I could watch it with VLC, so long as the download stayed ahead. Then that stopped working. Is there a way to recreate this functionality?
- xymostech 13y agoThis happens because it no longer downloads to the final location, it usually downloads to the same place but with .crdownload or something appended. I get around this by downloading with a different program (aria, wget, etc...) or by hard linking the file it's actually downloading to something looking like a movie file, and vlc-ing that.
- mikehearn 13y agoMy ideal product is the Netflix interface with, essentially, every movie and television show ever made. I imagine there are a lot of other people out there who also wish that product existed. It's hard to say how much I would pay for it, but I'm currently spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $150/month on a collection of services (Netflix, Time Warner, Usenet) that, in the end, only provide a very poor approximation of that ideal. This product is the closest I've seen to matching that vision. So despite its very obvious illegality, I appreciate the authors' efforts to try and push the UX boundaries around content viewing. Hopefully instead of Hollywood suing the pants off of the creators, they'll use it as a template for what might be possible if they could collectively get their shit together.
- bobbonifield 13y agoI've been saying the same thing for years. My hope is a company like Spotify or Rdio will lead the effort in this. The biggest obstacle is actually getting licensing rights, but honestly, I would pay so much for the service. That said, I think the cable companies would just jack the rates on internet service to compensate for their dwindling cable usage.
- tomc1985 13y agoSo there are really people running around, voluntarily refusing to pirate until they can pay someone for it? What a weird, weird world we live in...
- Doublon 13y agoI would love to have a server version of that which I could host on some VPS. It shouldn't be that hard as it's just some node/backbone code.
- joeblau 13y ago2014 version of Napster.
- dpanah 13y agoI would like a browser version of this to chrome cast it. Anyone know of one?
- kphild 13y agoYes! Excellent. In their face.
- wdewind 13y agoA much better solution to this problem is put.io
- maxholnaicher 13y agocan you get this to work together with popcorn time ?
- shykes 13y agoFYI there is another project like this being discussed on Hacker News in parallel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379166
- t3ra 13y agoIf anyone (or a contributor) from popcorn is reading this: Can you explain the SEEDING part of it in more details? As your description says it will be seeded for some time to avoid leeching but can you describe this in a little more detail. I know the project is trying to reduce/remove complexity from the torrent kingdom (its from whatever i see in this beta version i would say they have done a pretty good job!) but I have a (maybe an obvious) suggestion that you guys might want to add a "settings" pane somewhere so that users can play with settings. The only major criticism i have is that the project is overly depended on YIFY as the provider of content. Which is also a problem because everything is either in 720 or 1080. I hope some of the more "legal" providers learn from the simplicity of this project.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chucknelson 13y ago> It shouldn't be my responsibility to try to get these movies legally Ignoring that statement, which is a nice way to excuse your obvious criminal act(s), despite the correctness of the situation, paying these fees is fine when it's only a few, but the key is that we need centralized services to offer everything easily. If every content creator starts to have their own distribution method, get ready to complain about the "expensive" $10-15 fees you pay for 15 different services! I'm waiting for the day when consolidation hits and we have 3-5 major streaming players that have almost everything available. Netflix's movie selection is just depressing...
- dombili 13y ago>Ignoring that statement, which is a nice way to excuse your obvious criminal act(s) What's your suggestion, then? Should I refuse to consume them or force myself to go to cinema even though I don't want to? (nor have the time to do so.) I'm all ears. >the key is that we need centralized services to offer everything easily. If every content creator starts to have their own distribution method, get ready to complain about the "expensive" $10-15 fees you pay for 15 different services! Of course. It shouldn't get to the point where buying individual movies would be more cheaper to pay for streaming services. Studio executives should leave their egos aside and start acting reasonably. Who wouldn't pay, say, 15-20$ a month and you're allowed to watch 5 movies each month (and extra 3-5$ for each individual movie after that). That's a good and a fair deal for both parties.
- camillomiller 13y agoiTunes was criticized as a Monopoly, but it frigging revolutionized the music business. Steve Jobs, who first of all was a super music buff if there was one, wanted exactly this. Easy accessibility. He started with compromises (DRMs and so on) and then moved on to make the giants crumble down to the current obviousness of ubiquitous music access. Ten years later we need something that large and global, but for the movie business. It's harder and Steve's not around to kick movie executives asses anymore, but a service like Popcorn Time is very useful: they show exactly what people want and they should be a ringing bell for the movie industries. That's the way to follow, movie folks: do it or die painfully.
- jypepin 13y agoIs there anywhere that explains how streaming from torrent works?
- abustamam 13y agohttp://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3#faq2 http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3#faq2 It works very similarly to streaming anything. When you think about streaming a video on Netflix, the server sends the movie data to your computer sequentially, so after it downloads maybe the first 4 minutes, your movie starts playing, and while your movie plays it continues to download the rest of the movie. Streaming via torrent works similarly, except while the movie is playing, you're also seeding. It's generally frowned upon to download sequentially via a torrent because normally, torrent "pieces" are downloaded randomly to ensure that all pieces are available to everyone evenly. Imagine if everyone were trying to download the same piece at the same time! That's it in a nutshell!
- xpop2027 13y agoIt would be cool to pay a small fee in order to watch one of these movies once. Like a digital movie ticket
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- anjc 13y agoHow does this work? Is it downloading chunks in order from people, or just starting off doing that, then downloading the rest non-sequentially and streaming that? Is it seeding what it takes? Does it cache complete movies?
- meowface 13y agoAll those are answered on the website's FAQ.
- coretx 13y ago"Hit & Run" torrenting without proper seeding hurts the torrent community and makes Hollywood happy. I do not support "Popcorn Time", but i /do/ support free culture.
- wathars 13y agoAre you guys seriously crying and screaming about compensation when so many actors/directors/producers are filthy rich? I am sure they are all so hungry right now...Think about it! Not to mention the differences between countries regarding salaries and quality of life.
- abustamam 13y agoWould you support someone stealing a MacBook Pro or a Microsoft Surface? I mean, both Apple and Microsoft are filthy rich, so what's a few thousand?
- shmerl 13y agoWhat exactly does this client do? Does BitTorrent protocol support ordered downloading? What usually prevents streaming kind of usage is the fact that BitTorrent clients download file blocks without any specific order. If ordering is possible, then any client should be able to do that.
- cmiles74 13y agoIn my opinion, the real issue is more along the lines of "How do I purchase and watch a film that I would like to see." The solutions are many and varied, but none provides access to all of the films one might want to watch. A given film may never be available in a theater near you and once they leave, may never become available online (via Netflix, iTunes, etc.) Just like the record companies, the production houses are hoping that if they fight progress long and hard enough, people will continue to pay top dollar for physical media. In the case of the record companies, widespread pirating put pressure on these companies to make their content available online at reasonable prices. In my opinion, piracy is once again providing that pressure, this time on the film production houses. I believe that once the majority of films are available online at reasonable prices, products like Popcorn time will lose much of their appeal.
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- qasimvirjee 13y agoPopcorn Time's dead-simple user interface is what makes it so easy (and addictive) to use! I just posted some thoughts: http://www.designguru.org/blog/110314/popcorn-time-and-simplicity-pressing-play http://www.designguru.org/blog/110314/popcorn-time-and-simpl...
- BerislavLopac 13y agoI actually had the idea to a) create a similar product/service, b) charge for its use and c) transfer most of the income (keeping only enough to cover the running costs) to the producers of the original material, with or without their consent. I have no idea how would that work out, but I bet that after a few months/years of steady and growing income some things would start to change.
- lewaldman 13y agoSo finally, I as a "Internet Gueto" citzen can finally watch all the content that I really want to pay for but can't??? This is AMAZING news!!!
- frozenport 13y agoSexy, could it be done as an HTML5 app? That way it would be easier to distribute.