Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly | Hacker News Reader

Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly

getpopcornti.me

421 pointshussfelt373 comments

I 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.

> 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.

I'm a left of center guy, but this kind of thinking is a very ugly slippery slope. Its not that anyone should always expect to pay for things that are beneficial, its the fact that people who very recently WORKED to create the very thing you are benefiting from should be PAID for their work. If everyone followed your logic, we wouldn't have 12 Years A Slave. The props cost money. The costumes cost money. The cameras cost money. The cameramen's families eat fucking food, which costs money. Please, go out and find for me a quality movie that was made by unpaid volunteers. I haven't found one yet.

"Its not that anyone should always expect to pay for things that are beneficial, its the fact that people who very recently WORKED to create the very thing you are benefiting from should be PAID for their work."

Why did the camera, props, lighting and other workers contribute to the movie, if they weren't getting paid? How could they afford to?

In reality, of course, only the movie companies, some writers and a few big stars rely on percentages - the rest work for wages or get up-front money.

So your argument comes down to the special case where A puts out a recorded work, counting on royalties to pay for it, then B makes unauthorized copies - then A suffers, in some sense, a loss of the hypothetical revenue.

But wait, did B agree to pay? If there was no contract between A and B, then the supposed moral/ethical case for making B pay is reduced to "because the legislators said so". And if tomorrow the legislators grant a private monopoly on air to Monsanto, then by your reasoning we all suddenly become thieves.

There is a natural-rights case for copyright, but it extends only to the actual creators, and covers basically only correct attribution (as per some European laws [1]).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

Those wages and up-front monies likely come from capital investments. It's usually financed through producers or production houses with the expectation that the investment will be made back with profit from the box office and all of the residual royalties of video, TV, online streaming, etc. Making a movie or music record, at least at the small scale, is probably not that different than a software startup.

While B didn't agree to pay, B wanted to watch the works, (and C and D and and and) If B and C and D don't pay, then next time A won't make anything, and everyone loses.

Did you know walking is the leading cause of taxi cab unemployment? You should really consider the ugly nature of walking next time you decide not to cab it up. Taxis cost money, and their kids eat food.

The difference between taking a taxi and walking are significant. For your analogy to work you must alter it in one of two ways:

1. You hijack the taxi and demand the driver take you to your destination for free. This creates an equivalent or better experience for the consumer at zero or near-zero cost.

2. Instead of clicking a button and watching 12 Years a Slave, you get a crudely animated version pieced together by drawings crowdsourced from 1st grade students around the nation, and voiced entirely by Gilbert Gottfried.

If taxis go out of business, you can still walk. If people stop making new movies, you can't watch new movies.

(You can still watch old movies of course, so if you restrict your downloading to old movies, and not fairly recent releases, your argument works.)

If you hopped in the taxi cab, rode to your destination, and jumped out without paying the posted fare, you'd have a point.

quandrangle didn't say don't pay anyone. They said just because something is good, doesn't mean we have to pay every time we consume it. There are other conceivable ways of funding these things. Like crowd-funding, micropayments, whatever. If everyone followed quadrangle's logic, people who wanted to produce movies would find another way to fund them.

I guess you're unaware of independent films. 12 Years a Slave would absolutely be made, regardless of a non-blockbuster budget. There are always going to be people trying to make art or assist in doing so, without the intention of making an absurd amount of money. Why do these actors even need millions for a movie? Its an absurd amount that is more than necessary.

I suggest that the answer to the conundrum is to tear up the concepts "money" "paying" "salary".

The problem is digital isn't "real". For example, imagine I create a product called a "pet rock". Let's say this product is simply... a rock. Anyone who has access to outside can basically make their own copy. Is it their fault for "copying" without paying? Or is it my fault for making a product that is extremely easy to copy?

U.S. IP law is so outdated and in need of major reforms.

> we wouldn't have 12 Years A Slave.

We may still have 12 years a slave but maybe not at the same level of quality.

The alternative is to ask people to fund the movie in advance. Either in forms of a mandatory fee (like in Germany where each household has to pay ~20 Euro for public television) or in some other way. Since digital copies are free, their price should be close to zero.

I never said that people who make movies shouldn't be paid. The point is simple: however we figure out funding movie creation, doing so by making sure nobody ever benefits without paying is definitely the wrong approach.

If a movie looks good, ill go to see it. That's how Hollywood makes money. Unfortunately the majority of blockbusters are trash. That's what projects like this are for.

Copyright law acknowledges that the marginal cost is near zero. That's why copyright holders get a temporary monopoly. The goal is to incentivize the creation of these goods so that everyone can (later) get them at near-zero cost. Copyright law does not enshrine the idea that "you should always pay for anything that is beneficial." The idea is that as a society we collectively want to always pay for something that is a net positive.

There are many ways this system is currently broken (e.g. copyright lasting 70 years after creators death in US), but the fundamental concept of incentivizing creation of works that ultimately provide public benefit is sound.

The interesting thing is that the 'temporary' monopoly isn't really temporary as it keeps being extended before most copyrights expire. In theory it is temporary but in practice it's not (at least so far). To see this in action, look at the copyrights on Mikey mouse and how many times those have been extended right before they were set to expire.

Ah. This old argument again. It would make sense if people actually support artists. Every time some one brings this up in real life, I ask them for instances where they have actually supported somebody.

Ah this old misdirection. There is no shortage of evidence of voluntary payments for creative works so stop spreading bullshit. How far do you move the goalposts when people mention examples like the Humble Bundles, Nine Inch Nails, etc.?

Nine Inch Nails, etc.?

Go on. You might be able to cite Radiohead's In Rainbows. Did these new distribution models flourish, or were they one-off experiments? NIN's new album is available online now for a fixed price.

Nine Inch Nails? Seriously? I'm pretty sure they had already found success through the traditional channels before they had the ability to do something like that.

Crowd funding works in certain contexts, but it's no magic bullet.

Don't get me wrong. I like the crowd funding model, but the real world is not so perfect. We should not say "I won't pay for this, since somebody has already paid for it. " That puts everyone in a bad situation.

My policy: Enjoy something? Contribute back (or pay forward) in some tangible way.

There is also the aspect of risk. Do you pay someone before or after they make a product in an unknown market (E.g. Will this game be successful?). Paying for it rewards them for taking that risk.

Of course, if you commission something beforehand, you take away some of this risk, and the artist should gladly part with some of the rewards.

Just 2 days ago, I commissioned a work from a local painter.

People support artists in many ways. One of those ways is paying to enjoy the things they produce.

Commissions are the same as Kickstarter, IE you pay before it's created. In no way does something like this have any bearing on works by commission, in fact it puts things back on the path of human traditions, which have typically relied on commissions, patronage or performance, rather than ownership.

Supporting them doesn't mean paying for million dollar mansions and vehicles.

The gaffer doesn't have a mansion.

90% of the people who work on a movie couldn't hope to own a million dollar mansion.

And I bet most people can give you several. Can't remember the last time I bought a DVD or vinyl record, without having enjoyed it somewhere else first, for free.

The musicians/recording engineers/conductor/support staff don't deserve to be paid?

Well, 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.

Okay, so what about artists who are unable to play live for one reason or another (e.g. handicap, musical complexity). Recording engineering is different enough from live sound that it's almost two different jobs. And you're suggesting that the staff who do things like set up microphones and haul speakers should get paid to set that up for a live show but not paid to set that up for a recording?

If that is the case, why would any entertainer allow themselves to be recorded? And who would bother to waste the time and money to make the recording? I don't have the time nor desire to go to a concert, yet I enjoy listening to good music. Therefore I pay for it.

If people aren't willing to, nope. This is a slippery slope and we can't afford to pay every employee of dying professions forever.

I think utilities and reasonable physical safety and healthcare should be paid for by the people. But for the rest, the free market will work better than an infinity of laws and incentives to put people in a corner to pay up. Money, uh, finds a way...

> If people aren't willing to, nope.

The idea behind this comment is that if people don't care enough about the work to bother viewing it, the maker shouldn't be paid. Which I agree with; I hate the idea of government sponsorship of art no one wants. The difference here is, PEOPLE WANT THE ART, THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR IT. That's a huge distinction. It has value to people, but because they have the opportunity to steal it with no consequence, they do so.

The sense of smug entitlement in some of the posts in this thread is amazing.

"I should just get for free things that other people make because how dare they charge. If they're greedy enough to want to make money for their work, then they should follow a business model I set forth here and only make money by donations or selling other things I'm not going to buy anyway. Because freedom."

The sense of righteously indignant moralizing at others is just as "amazing" to me. And by amazing, I mean worthy of ridicule.

The performers need to be paid if you want to hear more in the future.

> I benefit from the work of Mozart and feel no need to compensate anyone.

Even on legal side you are not required to compensate anyone as it's so old that it's in public domain.

>I benefit from the work of Mozart and feel no need to compensate anyone.

Well, Mozart is dead, for one thing...

Exactly. Inn a few hundred years, 12 Years a Slave will be free to watch. But people don't want to wait that long, so they pay or steal.

actually, in 100 years, the copyright will be extended for another 200 years. that's how they've done it so far.

So.. yeah.

You'll work for free?

Pour cast. They can't buy new Ferarris because some kids watch that movie for free.

Hahahaha. The responses to my comment are hilariously off-the-wall. All I said was that the reasoning in the OP was wrong. The reason to pay for movies has nothing to do with the idea that benefits should always have a price.

That's all I said. The rest of my comment acknowledged that the economics and funding for movies is complex.

All the copyright apologists are so defensive, it's absurd. It's like you can't accept dropping any of your arguments, even when they are pointed out as plainly wrong. You are so worried that your whole case is ill-founded and won't be able to keep your position if you accept any criticism at all.

There might actually be some valid points on the pro-copyright side, but we don't get to see them if you keep defending the obviously invalid arguments…

Except that Mozart had ALREADY benefited from his work. But today many people feel they are entitled to watching movies and listening to music for free. The problem is that quality movies and music are expensive to produce. And rather have one person pay for them, they split the cost up over a lot of people. But if no one chooses to pay, these movies (that people apparently WANT) will no longer be produced.

So do you tell your boss he is free to pay or not pay you based on his mood for the week? And you are Ok with that yes?

There's probably a good analogy somewhere, but that isn't it. I don't have a contract with any movie production studio.

Actually you do. You pay the price they ask to consume their content, or you don't consume it. Hence why doing so without paying is illegal.

Sorry, but you're not paying the studio for watching a movie. The cinemas are paying the studios for having the right, to charge, whatever they want for you to consume movies. It's the theathers, the netflixs who put the final consuming price on something, you're just paying them, not the guy who worked in the sound system for that movie, or the guy who made the logo of the movie, he was payed, and for sure, not so equally as everyone in here are claiming to be paid.

The less people paying to see a movie equals less movies being made, which means less employment for people involved with making movies.

Related: in the promotional snapshot they use on the front page, all shown movies are in the public domain.

Ah, spoken like someone who has never created anything of value.

This kind of discourse just isn't productive.

What do you think the actual odds are that the parent has never created anything of value?

> Please, movie people, let me pay for this.

Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ICSVLPA/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/12-years-a-slave/id7403669...

And many others: http://www.foxdigitalhd.com/12-years-a-slave

Sony could not have made it any easier to get this film into your living room.

(Regardless, I don't think media companies have an obligation to make their content available to anyone, anywhere.)

"Amazon Instant Video (formerly Amazon Video On Demand and LoveFilm Instant) is an Internet video on demand service offered by Amazon in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan."

iTunes: I don't see renting option.

Fox Digital: "United States Brazil Mexico Canada Italia Australia Deutschland Belgium Holland United Kingdom España France"

ARRRR!

To add to your "ARRRR!", it is available for rent from iTunes in the US.

I was outsourced to Eastern Europe for a project and moved my iTunes account too, because it was a bother to send money to the old VISA card.

I have seldom felt so stupid (+) as I did the next time I looked at the empty iTunes store... :-)

(+) Cough, without alcohol being involved.

Thanks, I watched Harry Potter on iTunes too. Great point.

iTunes has won! I guess I will be watching it this weekend :)

Don't use propaganda terms like 'compensation' here. It's not compensation unless you hired someone to do something. The reason the media corporations want you to use terms that don't make rational sense is because it gets you to think, wrongly, that you owe them money all the time and forever. Don't fall for it my friend. No one thinks there's anything wrong with supporting creativity and artistry so let's stop using their bullshit terms together.

Here's the chain of money as I see it when making a movie:

1. Someone comes up with an idea for a movie 2. They approach someone with money to create the movie 3. Monied person gives idea person $X to make the movie with the assumption that they will receive back $X + $Y (ignoring Hollywood accounting). 4. Movie is made. People are paid out of $X 5a. Movie is successful. Monied person receives back $X + $Y 5b. Movie is unsuccessful. Monied person receives back $X - $Z

None of this simplified hypothetical happens without the idea or the monied person. The idea person makes an arrangement that allows them to realize their idea and make some coin. The monied person... Well, he just cares about money. So he wants to make more.

If movies are perpetually unsuccessful, guess what happens? The monied person ends up investing in something else, leaving the idea person out of luck.

I do agree with some of the other people on here that piracy puts pressure on the business people to improve access.

That could be a valid idea for a startup, where movie people can sign up to sell 'virtual tickets' that provide users with the legal right to watch a movie no matter where they got it from. It could even be transferrable, identifiable tickets (... ahem, cryptocurrency, ahem).

Most copyright disclaimers allow that already ("without the expressed written consent of the copyright owner" etc).

Has anyone ever implemented this?

There's UltraViolet, which is perhaps similar to what you're talking about (provided you own the content, you can in theory download/stream from any UltraViolet-enabled provider as long as they have that content)

It blows my mind that it's 2014 and we can't do this. We are locked behind garbage cable boxes, poorly built custom software, and region locking, all of which is from a different era.

Would you continue watching it if you had an unused ticket for that movie?

Accidentally? 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.

> Please, movie people, let me pay for this.

Pay for what, the ability to stream a movie? Don't we already have a dozen options for that?

I don't think this interesting as a feature, it's the backend technology that's interesting. On a related note, Spotify does something similar to get music to listeners by having existing users upload to new listeners.

I missed where anyone gave us the option of streaming new releases online.

Movie theaters offer neither convenience nor comfort. It's 2014, not 1914. Further, they are epicenters of disease transfer and otherwise completely and utterly dominated by inconsiderate jackasses who, to the benefit of everyone else, should actually probably stay at home.

It's hard to imagine that we live in a world where something so absurdly ancient is still the norm. They want us to endure that AND to pay $13 to watch a new movie. The 400% ROI on the first weekend of release isn't enough, they then want us to pay $20 to "own" the movie at home (and by own, I mean have access to watch it, because they learned that it's really bad to ever give anyone an actual copy of anything, because copyright law actually then prevents them from making even more money later on). Then maybe at some arbitrary point in the future, you can pay to watch a movie once, but for $5. Long after that movie is irrelevant. As a last attempt to extract money from a dead thing, and only as an attempt to make more money. It's in no way about your convenience, nor access to the work.

Imagine if music was still the same way. For every new work, radio stations are prevented from broadcasting the music at all. You have to go to an audio theater where you will sit in an uncomfortable chair with food stuffs splattered all over the floor, all the while battered from all directions with ads and menus for overpriced food and drink for "your enjoyment." You will listen using headphones that have clearly not been cleaned in a month, next to a person with a screaming child and another person who just sneezed a fine mist over 40 sq ft, much of which landed all over your face. Now you can listen to the latest and greatest the music industry has to offer. And oh yes, for this fine pleasure you WILL pay $13. No option just to hear the cover, not even at a reduced price. This is, after all, the bastion of decadence, a truly wondrous place where you should feel privileged to have access to the latest and greatest in entertainment! This is how kings live, and you'll like it!

Then 3-100 months later, chosen arbitrarily, you'll be given the "option" of having access to listen to that music whenever you wish for a mere $10 fee, and 18-500 months after that, finally, radios can start playing it, but only if they pay enormous sums of money to the copyright holders, which requires them to ask you for a subscription fee. What the fuck? You want to listen to music for free on the radio? LOL. Shut the fuck up and listen to my ads.

Clearly that model wouldn't work for music. They tried it, and it failed, so they actually adopted a better model, or rather they got out of the way and let innovators make things so convenient that piracy has become a mere historical oddity. I don't remember the last time I've even heard of someone pirating music.

So why do we still have these evil fucks insisting it works for movies? It very, very clearly doesn't. Piracy is a clear symptom of this. What happens when piracy becomes so easy and so simple that the barrier to entry gets lowered to nothing, so that everyone is suddenly able to experience availability as it should be? My sincerest hope is that it kills the profitability of the movie industry as we know it. Maybe then it may be replaced with something that actually places value in the consumer and their interaction with the work, not solely in the work itself.

Copyright is such bullshit. I have a personal policy of never going to the theater to see any film, despite how badly I want to.

Paying these animals only encourages their deviant behavior. If you value a free and open Internet, you will starve Hollywood until it dies.

Hollywood only continues to exist because people like you keep feeding them. Don't feed the animals.

When I visit the cinema, it's usually for the experience, and less to do with catching a new release. For example, I wanted to go see Gravity this week. I could torrent the movie, but I heard good things about Gravity in theaters. Nonetheless, all the theaters within an hour drive stopped playing it, so I'm out of luck.

They should allow people to buy and stream new releases online. Then, I think they should use theaters for a mix of new movies, and old movies. Run themes, have 80s week, or classic horror movie week, or Star Wars week, or Hitchcock week.

That's quite right.

You're paying the service, not the work done. The work is already payed. The investors now want to make more money and that's all. If they don't know what the consumer wants, i.e. you want to experience this movie on a theather, then they can't win money.

In fact, when you go to cinema, in theory, you're paying the theathers, not the filmakers or the camera man who filmed the movie. Maybe some actors have access to shared profits, but that's pretty rare business nowadays.

I'm tired of the same "compensation" history. What is the minimum compensation they want to leave a fair use? You will find the number can't be wrote down. Everyone wants free compensation for life.

I don't feel any bad for not paying those movies. These guys aren't exactly in need.

That said, yes, if the same service was proposed at a decent price and with recent releases (even popcorn doesn't get the freshest stuff), i'd totally just pay for it too.

Netflix, prime, etc don't even have stuff that's as recent or of similar quality.. (yes they've some of them)

It is the middleman problem. It is not yours. Movies will never disappear. You think all studios will close, no, they will just evolve or die. There are thousand examples of dead labor, technologies that passed away without much drama, just because consumers wanted a different thing or changed their consuming habits.

You can rent 12 years a slave on HD for $6, or buy it for $15 on Google Play. https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/12_Years_a_Slav...

Google Play only has an "Add to Wishlist" button for me.

You can already pay to watch instantly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuOaTwuzlrY

Not really: "This video is not available in your country."

"Sorry about that."

The video is not available in certain countries. In countries where it is available outside the United States and Canada, it costs close to 2x the price.

Why does it always need to be about the money?? Imagine giving a candy to a child. You make the child happy, and that is your reward. Or do you expect the child to say something like "let me pay you"?...

Just for fun, apply that logic to your work.

They already have been paid. Or you think mr. sound technician guy or lovely ms. Magda the hairdresser will receive money until his last day just because they have worked on a movie. The only one who will have that right is a company, who had nothing to do with filmaking process, they just invested, and for sure, after the premiere they've got, or not, a lot of money. Even the main actors release "rights".

To me entertainment is very simple. The person who offers the entertainment presents a value. It is up to me whether or not the entertainment is worth the value. If it is, I'll pay the price, if it is not, then I will move on to one of a million other options. It's really that simple. If you don't like the deal that is offered then move on to the next one. I have no automatic right to any of the entertainment created. It is no different from any other transaction.

I imagine that the fact that the regular worker has already been paid is not the big picture here.

If every movie is stolen or given away for free, this reduces the incentive to create more big pictures that would keep giving these people jobs.

Eventually this could possibly lead to fewer people getting paid much needed money due to fewer productions happening.

When I work, and want to be paid, I say upfront "I can do this for you, and it will cost you X". However if I say "here, please, take this, it's for you" it means exactly that. I don't want you to put any monetary value. Because there's a chance you might undervaluate it...

I 100% do not understand this argument. So, because I enjoy something, I shouldn't have to pay for it?

Can you please flush out this argument a bit?

If I give something to you it's entirelly up to me to decide whether I want you to give me money. If I want to give (for free) and enjoy doing that, please stop saying "take my money", because I don't want it. If I wanted your money I would have said so or at least hinted you. In other words, don't spoil the moment.

On the other hand, may be it's just me being too sentimental... Or may be it's because I grew up in an evironment where not everything was measured by the money, and giving and helping others without expecting to be "paid" was relatively normal.

Except the copyright owners aren't giving anyone anything.

If Disney put up, front-and-center on their website, a download link for Frozen, saying, "It's our gift to you! No strings attached!" then your analogy would work.

When I do a favor or give a gift to someone, I do it out of the kindness of my heart, or because I care about the person I'm doing the favor for. But when I show up to work and perform my duties, I expect to be compensated. Furthermore, even if I _do_ do something out of the kindness of my heart (like staying late to cover an absent employee's shift) I still expect to be compensated.

There's a time and place for volunteer/charity work, and there's a time and place for compensated work. If everyone just did favors for others, there'd be a lot more people who get screwed over (and also less incentive to do very technical work)

If you look at this file here: 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/

You're far more likely to be caught by directly looking at torrent peers as is already done in bulk by media companies and is far better proof of piracy than a Google Analytics hit. Use a VPN if you're using this and have any questions about the legality of it in your area. Typically VPN providers only get complaints sent to datacenters, not actual lawsuits.

looking at torrent peers ... and is far better proof of piracy

It's not proof of piracy. It just proves that some bytes were downloaded. What, for example, if you could prove that you paid for the movie you're downloading? Lets say you buy a movie using the Video app on the Xbox, but want to watch it on your old Windows XP desktop, or on your Android phone?

Sadly given the silly state of copyright in the digital age, you'd still be guilty of copyright infringement by doing that.

Which is why copyright needs to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern age.

If you're streaming from a torrent:

1. You're downloading. This may or may not be copyright infringement, even if you do already have other licence[s] for the media. Check the licences and the law, if you can understand either.

2. If you're seeding, you're allowing others to download from you. If you're not licensed to do this by the copyright holder [if any], you might be infringing in certain jurisdictions.

I simply meant to compare with Google Analytics hits, not to say anything is absolute proof, but being on a tracker or DHT is certainly a better indication than GA would be.

Though if you personally join the peer queue and serve over 30s of a movie to them, you've just proved that someone using that IP is pirating that movie. Even if you own the movie elsewhere, if I recall correctly many jurisdictions do not protect the personal transfer you're talking about. The laws are quite stupid here, but that's just how it is.

if you could prove that you paid for the movie you're downloading? Lets say you buy a movie using the Video app on the Xbox, but want to watch it on your old Windows XP desktop, or on your Android phone?

I'd be very surprised to learn there's a legal way for you to do this considering the movie you download on your Xbox is going to be PlayReady DRM encumbered.

It's the uploading, not downloading that's proof of piracy.

Add 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

Confirmed with WireShark. This app is a GUI around YIFY.

The binary you download from Mega.co.nz uses "YIFY Torrents" website yts.re exclusively. Github code seems to be actually used. So it all runs via this single webserver (+Google analytics). Just to verify what a installed binary blob does on your Linux box. The ease of use is impressive, a new level for P2P-ish work since Napster/Kazaa/Limewire days.

I use SomeoneWhoCares.org:

   curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Well that's an incredibly dangerous command to run without thinking.

FYI, the google analytics lines are commented out in that source, as it "breaks some sites". So your command doesn't help in this case until you uncomment those lines.

Noooooooooo (An analytics junkie)

Convince your customers to use self-hosted analytics software instead. Of course you understand the danger of a single entity (google-analytics.com) tracking almost every website you visit.

I block it with Ghostery.

And google.com too?

Take 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.

What danger are GET requests to google.com?

We should create a fork, without these 'features'.

First step is done:

https://github.com/neuromancer/popcorn-app

You are downloading torrents to do this so you shouldn't be using this without going through a socks or vpn anyway

Doesn't it already send your IP to the torrent tracker and anyone who asks, because that's how torrent works?

You shouldn't be doing anything, let alone torrenting, without a VPN these days.

Deleted comment

> 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...

>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.

iTunes 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.

XBMC torrent has been out there for a while http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

It's free software https://github.com/steeve/xbmctorrent and uses libtorrent-rasterbar through https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent-go

Just in case, I started a new HN thread here[1].

Disclosure: I'm the author.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379166

Yes, but this one aims for nice interface and simplicity - install and start watching. For people who are not tech savy this app will win.

People who are not tech savvy want to watch movies on a television or a tablet, not a PC.

RASPMC and a Raspberry Pi. Takes like 3 seconds to get setup and is easier to get going than a DVR. My parents have no issues using XBMC on my Raspberry Pi that I left back home.

Ex-RaspBMC user here. I used it for a while, but honestly, that interface running on the pi's ARM processor is awful.

I know the pi was created to be an educational tool, not a media device, but therein lies the problem.

This is true for the old generation, not true for the not tech savvy new generation that watches movie on laptops, tablets and PCs.

Even for the tech savvy, the user experience is very important.

Came 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.

Most likely your SD card is full. This can happen on some installs like OpenELEC which don't use the whole SD card.

Even utorrent has the stream feature.

My 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.

I'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.

> 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."

That question has been answered: we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!

So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically -- more goods are more widely available.

While there is a lot of piracy, it's relatively small compared to the overall entertainment market. It's still been generally limited to the tech savvy crowd. Setting up bittorrent or usenet is just too hard for the average person. They could learn it, but they are unwilling to even try to.

An app like this? Which is just download and it works? That is a huge threat. My grandma could use this.

So while a small amount of piracy isn't harmful, everyone being able to pirate everything with total ease, is harmful.

The copyright industry has been 'crying wolf' for ages. No-one should listen.

We do not even know that very large amounts of piracy would be bad -- the market would probably reconfigure and adapt.

We should increase people's ease at getting and using informational goods (by reducing artificial restrictions) and see what happens -- yes, observe the actual evidence.

>we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!

That just means despite losing "potential income" the industry is still managing to earn money via people who do not wish to circumvent Copyright Law. Or in other words, the number of people not interested in infringing copyright is greater than the number of pirates. That doesn't mean anything other than a majority of people respect copyright law.

>So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically

Please link to data that demonstrates piracy is economically beneficial to everyone. Since you're claiming 'almost certainly' - I assume you can find hundreds of studies.

Here is my simple thought experiment. Let us say it was impossible to pirate Windows or popular games or tv shows and people had to pay the $100 or w/e it is. Would every single pirate switch to Linux, free games, non-copyrighted entertainment OR Will some of them end up paying the $100?

If reducing Windows piracy means more Linux adoption, I wonder if the Linux cheerleaders would be onboard to reduce Windows piracy :)

As Landes and Posner say in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law' (Conclusion, p422, s3) (2003):

"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."

And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.

Now, the main purpose of copyright is to get the best trade-off in production level and access to goods. So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?

> losing 'potential income'

What does that even mean? Really, what? If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!

The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)

Many in the music industry who've seen how it looks now vs before MP3s and high bandwidth came along would disagree.

Capital-I Industry, perhaps. But I argue that it's because it's a lot harder to sell garbage albums with just one or two hit songs when you can go to Bandcamp and find a better artist, preview a whole album, and buy it for $5.

Welcome to the 21st century. Burying your head in the sand will do nothing, you can't un-invent the technology so either embrace it or fade out.

Yes but you could also argue that there are many many many more artists making money in the music industry now, and that consumers have much more choice.

Sure they're not all making millions, but I'd rather see an industry with more players each making less money (i.e. more choices for me), than a smaller group of pre-selected artists (and the machinery behind them) that take home tons of money but put out less varied produced-by-committee content designed for mass consumption.

So I think it's arguable whether it's better or worse for the industry, but it's definitely better for the consumer.

That's like if the parent post said, "The invention of the web allowed many more people to communicate, and was an economic boon" and you replied, "Microsoft would disagree."

Just because the old toll collectors, middlemen, and gatekeepers are worse off doesn't mean that's true for society as a whole.

If plenty of music is being made, so what? If certain businesses cannot make so much money, tough luck on them -- they should get out of business. That is the market.

The purpose of copyright law is to ensure good amounts of production for the public overall. It is not there to help certain rent-seeking companies make money.

What did professional music look like before radio? Before audio recording? I'm not convinced that business models that emerged due to technological change should be protected from future technology.

That's illogical. We've had bank robberies for centuries, and the finance industry is doing just fine!

You would need an alternate universe with no torrenting to server as a control for your statement.

In Netherland, we pay a "home copy" fee on harddisks and smartphones, which makes it entirely legal and ethical to download movies.

Only downside: uploading movies without permission from the copyright holder is still illegal, and bittorrent uploads while it downloads, so this may still be illegal.

We have the same 'private copy' tax in France. It is a tax on ALL storages (proportional to the size) to take a fee in the case you would use the storage for copyrighted stuff. While it does not make download legal, in my opinion it makes it ethical. I paid a tax on it, I might as well use it.

A tax that was worth 193.000.000 € in 2011. Not enough to balance the alleged losses but… not bad, I guess.

"Les flux financiers de la Rémunération pour Copie Privée": http://bit.ly/1fn0PqX

That's not the only downside. The other is there's a tax on storage hardware even if you never do anything with copyrighted anything. And all the tax ends up going to wealthy corporations anyway and smaller artists will never see anything.

Oh absolutely. There are lots of reasons to object to the fee. So if you want to get your money's worth out of it, you'd better start downloading.

They seem to be leaving the ethical considerations to the users, which I think is perfectly reasonable. Popcorn Time can't decide for you whether it's okay to stream a movie that you own the VHS for. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie published by a company that distorts copyright law for its own financial gain.

>>Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore.

That would be a great idea. However, the Popcorn Time website states that they only use torrents from YIFY. A brief perusal of the YIFY website tells me that they only have recent or big blockbuster films. I tried searching for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Intolerance", and neither showed up. As far as the status of the service goes right now, its main purpose is to stream pirated movies. This could change in the future as Popcorn Time opens up to accept more sources.

They only created a tool. Tools can be used for many purposes. I can smash someone in the skull with a hammer or I can use it for construction. Similarly, should the Tor, PGP, Bitcoin, etc authors consider that their tools could be used for malice and stop because of it? Tools are tools, they are simply implementations of what is possible with technology. Tools are inherently grey, not some simple black and white. It's about what you do with them.

It doesn't matter how legal your tools are if what you're doing is illegal. And this particular tool is pre-populated with copyrighted content. They don't show it in the screen captures (why? </sarcasm>), but all the films in the popular tab are 2013-2014 major U.S. theatrical releases.

Very true, I hope the devs published this somewhat anonymously at least. It's essentially just YIFY torrents taped to the peerflix script with some node-webkit glue.

I, for one, do not believe in intellectual property. Information not being rare commodity, it makes no sense to artificially limit it's supply by issuing state enforced monopolies. That actually infringes on actual property such as a hard disk, by limiting the number of combinations of bits that you're allowed to store on it.

Doesn't it pretend? The screenshoot shows very old movies. My initial impression from the web site was that this application provided a nice interface to some repository of freely redistributable movies.

I pay for Spotify, for Netflix, and for a Cineworld Unlimited card. Pretty sure I'm on the right side of the ethical fence on this one.

YouTube has established a huge gray zone though! So much of the material I watch there is not actually uploaded with permission.

And 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.

this is free software. Even if they did that, someone would fork it to bring back the illegal content.

But it requires copyright holders to be part of it. Most are not, and most can not.

Stream 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.

Do 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.

No, 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-pick...

I think that analysis only holds for people who want the whole package and aren't in a hurry.

If you're shifting to a demand-driven system, then pieces aren't needed equally. A numerically even piece distribution isn't what the swarm most needs. Indeed, I start watching things on Netflix that I never finish, so having more people with early pieces of something would better mirror actual demand for them.

I'm sure that plenty of people in the Bittorrent community are worried about change, but plenty of people in every community are worried about change. Until I see some math or some simulations demonstrating that this can't work, I won't be persuaded that there's an actual problem beyond the (reasonable and legitimate) fear of change.

It 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.

This is a real issue indeed. First of all, in XBMCtorrent, I'm using libtorrent-rasterbar, which is _very_ optimized for the swarm.

Second, seeding in enforced during playback, to "give back".

Third, there is a time randomization in which hot spots (pieces who are big demand) are also the ones who are the most shared (since everybody is seeding these).

Prime time is time-zone dependent.

People have been using similar technology to stream football games, which are as 'Prime Time' as things get. I don't see an issue.

If 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.

This 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.

If there were ever a title worthy of being enjoyed without compensating its creators for their labors, it's "12 Years a Slave", right?

The cognitive dissonance, it burns.

Try http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

I 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.

Why shouldn't the cost of entertainment naturally drop as more high-quality content is produced? And if that's the case, aren't big-budget productions already living on borrowed time?

To explain, entertainment is fungible, and today we have an embarrassment of entertaining riches: books, hangouts, news, board games, video games, music, TV, social web, sporting events, etc. Almost all of these things can be distributed world-wide at minimal per-unit cost.

Since entertainment is fungible, the competition for for 12 Years a Slave isn't just Dallas Buyers Club, it's also 2048, reddit, Attack on Titan, the Olympics, and whatever piques my interest during a Steam Sale. That sounds like the increase in supply for entertainment is far outstripping the increase in demand.

That's an interesting take on it. Even in a single entertainment category it can often feel like the supply far outstrips demand, especially if my morbidly obese Steam library is considered.

> Since entertainment is fungible, the competition for for 12 Years a Slave isn't just Dallas Buyers Club, it's also 2048, reddit, Attack on Titan, the Olympics, and whatever piques my interest during a Steam Sale. That sounds like the increase in supply for entertainment is far outstripping the increase in demand.

That's only because the home video market allowed people the luxury to legally watch any existing movie anytime they want, once they have purchased it, without the possibility of the studio revoking permission.

Don't worry - studios are already trying to think of ways to "fix" that (stream-only content that is never released in DVD format is one example)

Hollywood studios (should) make their money in cinemas, before the DVD/BlueRay release. CAMRips are not really competitors.

Can you explain your reasoning behind

> Hollywood studios (should) make their money in cinemas

I'd be just as happy if all movies went straight to streaming, I'd even be ok with higher prices closer to the release if they did drop down to reasonable levels after a period of time. I personally have grown to hate going to the theater, I find it much more enjoyable to watch movies in the comfort of my home without people talking, babies crying, and teenage girls on their cell phones the whole time. Not to mention I refuse to pay for concessions which are extremely over priced.

Many 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.

What 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).

Or maybe it will push content providers to make movies and shows available for streaming from day one. So far piracy has only done good things for consumers, in the sense that it has forced Big Content to do what consumers wanted all along, ever since Napster came out.

How do you compete when the same content is readily available, instantly, for free, and in a usable interface?

By making it actually readily available, instantly, in a usable interface, close enough to free as customer doesn't care the cost.

For decades, I've seen endless such "but it's free/easy/instant" things be anything but, insofar as it takes resources (time, fiddling, knowledge, skill, tools, etc) costing on par with paid versions, isn't easy for >90% of the population, and falls down often enough that it's hardly 'instant'.

$99 + $8/mo works a whole lot better than most any "free/easy/instant" solution I've seen. Sure, you may be one of the fringe consumers who can handle such solutions, but most people can't. There's always some part which is so dull/annoying/unsatisfying, but must be done right to achieve persistent widespread acceptance, that you'll have to pay (and recoup) someone to do.

How does Netflix?

By offering better service, which Netflix and similar largely have.

If 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) and 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 !

Double Edit: The API appears to be developed by the Popcorn Time people, as per https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/issues/294

Popcorn 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'}, {'quality': '720p', url: 'http://url.torrent'}, {'quality': 'undefined', url: 'http://url.torrent'} ], subtitles: [ {'language': 'en', url: 'http://url.srt'}, {'language': 'undefined', url: 'http://url.srt'} ], imdb_id:, title:, year:, runtime:, synopsis:, voteAverage:, poster:, backdrop:, seeders:, leechers: ] } }

This was made here in Argentina, we don't think that much of legal issues here.

Exactly, good luck to the RIAA goons trying to mess with South Americans.

They can just pay off the politicians to throw the developers in jail.

<joke>Or bring some democracy.</joke>

Discussion about Time's article on this piece of software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377089

Public domain movies. Ya.. Be careful and all that when they're not, you're not just consuming copyrighted works you are distributing them.

In 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.

Can someone confirm that the .exe I download is the compiled version of the github repo?

Seems somewhat unethical to release something that is essentially designed for piracy.

Is 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?

Movies 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.)

I never said that we should receive them for free. Re-read my post. Slowly.

Look at MP3s, Napster and iTunes. The Music industry refused to offer digital alternatives leading to Napster. It was(/is) easier to get music for free. Why would I buy a CD with a rootkit on it (look up Sony Fiasco #87), or pay $15 for a CD when I only want one song? Why go to the store when I can get it sitting at home?

It was easier to get for free, and the industry suffered for not giving customers what they wanted.

Now we have iTunes/Amazon/etc and I can buy a CD OR just a single song! Or I can subscribe to Pandora/LastFM/etc to get music other ways.

I get to support the artists I like with ease! EVEN THOUGH I can get it "for free". It's not a BURDER to support my music entertainment "needs" and I have multiple options.

Now... compare that to Movies where they make fake scarcity by forcing a release cycle that basically forces people to pay multiple times. Movie. Followed by DVD. Followed by DVD Ultimate Edition. Followed by Red Box. etc... (not to mention DRM and other restrictions). Followed by broken availability (This only available on Netflix... that only on Amazon... Hulu... Disney... blah blah bleh)

There is no reason they can't do Movie followed by general release. Rentals on the same day as DVD release. Available in multiple places easily.

Or do you honestly believe there is a good reason for a months long delay forced on Red Box (or similar) before they can start renting a DVD? AFTER Months long delays to get to DVD?

I think you mean redbox.

Woops... Freudian slip. Thank you.

You mean for SHARING. It seems somewhat unethical to try to say that people interested in sharing are "pirates".

It depends what they are sharing. Sharing copyrighted works without the authorization of the copyright holder is the common definition of piracy. In which case, how is it unethical (as you say) to equate the two?

Because "piracy" is a slur that equates sharing to attacking ships and stealing cargo and threatening or even killing people.

The implication in copyright-infringement = piracy is that when you share something, you are an aggressor actively attacking the copyright holder. It's complete garbage and shouldn't be tolerated. Sharing is the complete opposite motivation from stealing. We want to encourage sharing and oppose stealing. Trying to equate them is ludicrous.

We 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.

Except this will result in massive bandwith charges for all nodes included.

This 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.

"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.

Can i beam this with chromecast?

As long as the video is in a supported format you should be able to: http://bolivar.tumblr.com/post/79222932441/popcorn-time-chro...

Nope, but there is a pull request for Chromecast support. I hear the Chromecast SDK is still a bit buggy, though.

I 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.

Popcorn 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-simpl...

Is this legal in Canada? Because this constitutes streaming and not uploading, so it should be legal?

This 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

This 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.

Not 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)

The Canadian copyright lawyer I talked to says no:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/popcorn-time-is-like-netfl...

I haven't look at the technical details, but it does use Bittorrent, so you're most likely peering and seeding to other users too.

Yep. You're definitely also uploading.

What 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.

On 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?

This 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.

How 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?

All those are answered on the website's FAQ.

Thanks.

Edit: Wait a second, none of them are answered! Unless i'm looking at a different FAQ

Yeah, now that I look at it, looks like you're right. Most of the questions are answered elsewhere in this thread, though.

Sexy, could it be done as an HTML5 app? That way it would be easier to distribute.

FYI there is another project like this being discussed on Hacker News in parallel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379166

This 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.

The MPAA already has the ability to view torrent seeds, why would they waste so much resources to create this?

Binary 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.

Honeypot, but that doesn't hold up since torrenting movies is so wide spread already.

But just in time for TPP deliberations.

Wouldn'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.

uTorrent 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

Isn't it also thought that this kind of sequential torrenting is bad for the swarm's health?

I'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.

Why 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.

If the FS API were standardized and broadly adopted then yeah, it wouldn't be an issue. I've never gone around trying to store greater than localstorage on all the browsers though to know if it would work.

There 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.

I 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.

>YIFY torrents

Why bother.

Yeah, 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".

XBMCtorrent has other providers (such as Kickass). http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

Check this then http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

If you watch from a small screen it's not that bad!

So 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!!!

would 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.

This is pretty much illegal in the U.S., right?

Not if you watch public-domain movies with it.

Or CC licensed ones: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Films

Yep, is it actually legal any where?

It'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.

In Poland you can download anything for your own private use - so this would be completely legal.

This is a torrent client, and uploads while you watch.

Well, 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.

South America.

Switzerland

Actually it's also illegal in Switzerland, as it includes the uploading of the movie.

However, there has never been a verdict on this.

The west finally caught up to china (PPS).

i 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"

Disagree 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/

Your use of capitalization is completely unnecessary. I think a better convention might be to use single stars like completely or double stars like completely but the moment I see letters in all caps I just automatically disregard whatever it is that person is saying.

Edit: HN doesn't seem to know what to do with double stars.

Thanks for LETTING me KNOW?

This 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.

I 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.

The subtitles feature is a huge win for me. My partner is Spanish speaking so every film we watch requires a hunt through various subtitles sites(not being able to use srt files with likes the of iTunes is also a major issue when paying for films). Of course I know how to do it but it's one of those things that has really made we wish there was a good quality commercial offering(I'd be very happy to pay something like $70/month for a spotify type service).

VLC player has a plugin that can do this for you. It's called Vlsub. It doesn't check for synchronization, but you can try out about 3-4 subtitles in less than a minute, so it works very well in practice.

Also, check out Filebot. It does sub hunting and has organization and renaming facilities too.

English speaker, but I have hearing issues.

That's going to be incredibly handy, thanks!

Once you involve the filesystem, you lose about 90% of users. Personally, I think hierarchical file systems a pain in the ass. I'm glad platforms are moving away from them.

If I understand you correctly that you don't care for the paradigm of organizing your data in a hierarchical database I would be curious to know what you would use preferably, say when you want to open a document? Tags? Full content search?

I disagree completely. It's not about solving a the problem of not being able to "download a torrent file", but adding a new functionality to an established protocol.

I find the idea very interesting, conceptually and technically.

Then just don't read/upvote/post in this thread, the community already has the necessary tools (upvote and downvote) to decide whether it is the place here for this type of threads or not.

It would be cool to pay a small fee in order to watch one of these movies once. Like a digital movie ticket

Is there a way to stream it over DLNA?

Although 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.

Seems to be open-source: https://github.com/popcorn-time

Is there anywhere that explains how streaming from torrent works?

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!

2014 version of Napster.

A much better solution to this problem is put.io

can you get this to work together with popcorn time ?

Yes! Excellent. In their face.

fucking awesome

Are 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.

Would 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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com