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Popcorn-app

github.com

325 pointsilhackernews163 comments

Popcorn Time (or the next leeching app) isn't good for torrents and sharing in general. If everybody switched to this type of software, there won't be enough seeds. Or maybe seeders will predominantly be those with some commercial interests (malware, ads?); and torrents will no longer be truly peer to peer.

Add: The old FAQ is gone, but quote from http://www.ibtimes.com/popcorn-time-movie-streaming-netflix-... : "According to Popcorn Time’s FAQ, you do indeed seed (upload) parts of the movie while you watch. Popcorn Time does state that ‘your movies will stay buried in a secret folder somewhere in your drive until you restart your computer. Then it will be gone for good.’"

Interesting... Do you have a link to more info about this? Specifically regarding the malware?

I was speculating that if everybody switched to streaming torrents, nobody will bother seeding. Except those who have some interest in being a seeder.

I do think that many (non-technical) people being unaware of seeding or ratios helped torrents a lot. They watched movies, and they became seeders.

Actually. Those that are watching the movies are actually seeding those movies at the same time :)

It's really unusual though to have a seed ratio of 1 by the time a torrent has finished downloading. There's no way this is sustainable unless you make the movies hang around after they're watched and continue seeding into the future.

Isn't this just piggybacking on normal torrents on TPB. There are tons of seeds already by people that want to keep a copy locally and seed for months.

The key difference between Popcorntime and 'normal' torrents is that it's not "by the time a torrent has finished downloading" but "by the time you have finished watching the movie".

In order to use Popcorntime, you'd pretty much have to have a connection speed where downloading the movie is significantly faster than watching it (a few minutes at a reasonable speed/quality) and by the time the movie ends you have downloaded it once but uploaded many times.

And given the way the tech works, you can ignore ADSL users with restricted upload speeds and other similar groups - the total average is disproportionally influenced by high-speed users; so if for every dozen ADSL users there's a single FTTH user, then the total still works out well - 10 users with a ratio of 0.1 are equalized by a single user with a ratio of 10.

> It's really unusual though to have a seed ratio of 1 by the time a torrent has finished downloading.

If you are streaming, you will very likely be downloading faster than you can play the file (people who download slower won't be streaming). So you will be seeding a lot longer.

This is incorrect. By design, torrent participants both download AND upload at the same time. If you don't believe me, check your network activity using the tool that comes with your OS. You'll see significant upload transfer. :)

I think you're missing his point.

The success of bittorrent as a swarming protocol is that each client tries to download the least available snippet of the file it wants. This increases the chances that other clients will be able to find 100% of the pieces of a file as they go through the download process.

With popcorn and other streaming-torrent hybrids, the clients requests are biased towards the snippets of file that the user is about to watch. This makes the beginning of the movie widely available (as all clients start there to begin a stream) but increases the chance that bits of the middle or end of the movie aren't available when a given client needs them.

This may be true, but on my network it takes less than 5 minutes to download a 2GB file and 20 minutes to have 200% upload. I usually stop uploading after that. Now if I were to use Popcorn Movie I'd be uploading for much longer period.

And some people have networks where constantly seeding an entire thing—be it a movie or a Linux distro—is not feasible. When you have 3mbps down/1mbps up DSL, it's going to saturate your upload if you leave it unchecked, and still have a very negative impact even if you throttle.

In most countries, your average Internet consumer can't achieve the speeds you described, though. Also, the download-to-upload rate is significantly higher.

For example, my peak download speed is 5Mbits while the upload speed peaks at 0.6Mbits. That's on one of the more expensive packages, too.

Exactly, people seem to forget the usage patterns.

Sure. But the app seems to be focused on streaming very popular torrents, which means that generally all pieces will be available enough.

Also, all Popcorntime clients want the same blocks first, meaning they will both need and seed the first blocks more. So they do not cause an imbalance, as long as there are always some peers that have the full movie.

> But the app seems to be focused on streaming very popular torrents, which means that generally all pieces will be available enough.

This lacks a lot of foresight.

> Also, all Popcorntime clients want the same blocks first, meaning they will both need and seed the first blocks more. So they do not cause an imbalance, as long as there are always some peers that have the full movie.

And this is just plain wrong.

Saying someone is wrong isn't useful if there is no explanation.

http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Sequential_downloading_is_bad

> The older peers have already completed the first few files and thus aren't interested in younger peers who currently download the first file exclusively, thus no mutually beneficial relationship can be established between different "generations" of prioritizing peers, effectively splitting the swarm into sparsely connected sets.

I don't understand this. Why does it need to be mutually beneficial? The peers should "pay it forward" by uploading to younger peers, even if the ones they downloaded from are not benefitting.

> On a small swarm this behavior can lead to pieces drop to the 0 availability because some peers concentrate on the first few files while the last peer/seed that has the rare piece in one of the later file quits after doing his fair share, but he only uploaded data for the first few files because the prioritizing peers were interested in those only.

This could be mitigated by using excess bandwidth beyond that needed for streaming to download rare chunks, and ensuring that the streaming application keeps seeding for a while after the video has been watched.

> This could be mitigated by using excess bandwidth beyond that needed for streaming to download rare chunks, and ensuring that the streaming application keeps seeding for a while after the video has been watched.

That wouldn't be streaming then, would it?

Why wouldn't it be? It is still streaming and it will start playing the video soon after you hit the play button instead of downloading the entire video first. The only difference is that it will be caching the download for a certain period of time and possibly downloading rare chunks with extra bandwidth ahead of when the chunks are actually needed. The truth is though, if the torrent is not top heavy with seeders then it is no good anyway so I don't really get why people are so focused on rare chunks.

I'd say it's more of a middle ground between streaming and normal torrent behavior.

The peers with less of the file and further from the seeders will tend to have higher bandwidth as they have more peers they can download from. The vast majority of the network is after only one piece of the file and few peers have it. This collapses the network into a more tree like structure (rather than the desired mesh) which limits the network bandwidth. Whether this is enough to degrade the swarm to the point were it is not useful for streaming or even causes the file to become incomplete is another question, but it does impact bandwidth. I can give an example if this still isn't apparent, but it'd take me a bit to write up.

From uTorrent's website [1]:

"If everyone streamed every file at the same time, the ecosystem would be negatively affected. That’s why we’ve put in safeguards to protect the ecosystem such as disallowing streaming when there aren’t enough seeders for a file, and preventing users from streaming more than a single file at a time. With these protections, we’ve tested and found no negative effect on the ecosystem. This is a property we’ll continue to monitor and adjust for as streaming becomes more widely used."

[1]: http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3

I think you are missing the point as well. People will not start watching movie at the same time. When one person is almost done another just begins the movie, thus as long as there are few initial seeds and healthy interest in the movie it does not matter which order chunks will be downloaded.

This is a _very_ interesting comment. There _must_ be a switch on the logic of the streaming.

If you want to "stream" the torrent, you will need to start with the first chunks But i think we can do something nice about it. We need to add some transfer stats to the downloading and use it.

You have the file xyz.mp4 with 20 chunks.

First, you leech the first 4 chunks (first 20 minutes of the xyz.mp4 file)

Then you analyze aprox. transfer speed. Let's say you are downloading 2 minutes of movie per second.

If you already downloaded the first 20 minutes, you have at least 15 minutes until you need to start downloading the chunk number 5.

We should use those 15 minutes to download the last chunks (20, 19, 18...)

After 15 minutes you start downloading chunk number 5, 6, 7... and repeat the process.

I think this could work fine, YTS should do something about this.

I agree that we should try to make all chunks of a file available for the other peers, but also all files that participate in the p2p network.

I am not sure which kind of structured p2p system popcorn time sues, but if it was a DHT it should make sure that there is replication of the rarest files works too.

So that people who want to watch weird east European movies also have the opportunity, just as those who want to watch the latest blockbuster.

I hope popcorn time does not immediately delete cached chunks...what a waste.

XBMCtorrent approaches this by seeding the movie until you finish watching it. In my experience, movies start playing within the first minute and are finished downloading within the first hour (well, 10-20 minutes for popular content), meaning a large portion of the movie's running time is devoted to seeding 100% of the file.

https://github.com/steeve/xbmctorrent#doesnt-sequential-down...

Intriguing... is that really so much of a factor? To torrent-stream successfully you have to have eventually loaded all snippets from beginning to end of a file and could potentially be offering them for download at most only a couple of hours later than if you downloaded it first snippet.

That is not necessarily true, it will depend on the number of peers and the chunk replication rate. You can tweak the ratios so that the first part is available more often.

In fact,you are also forgetting about the usage of each peer application. With traditional torrents you download the movie, close the app and watch the movie. Total seeding time is the same as the downloading time.

With popcorn time you are seeding WHILE watching the movie, the total seeding time is much, much longer than in the first case.

Most broadband is asymmetrical (ADSL) so the downstream bandwidth is at least an order of magnitude more than upstream. As you download, your upstream bandwidth is saturated just with the acknowledgement traffic (non-payload ACK) of the download.

You can verify the effect yourself by comparing the network upload statistics from your operating system with the seed statistics of your bittorrent client.

> By design, torrent participants both download AND upload at the same time.

That is, by definition, a leech. [1]

Seed: A downloader that obtains 100% of the data becomes a seed.

And here in this case, a while after someone becomes a seed the file gets deleted permanently.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_BitTorrent_terms

That's a weird definition. If you divide a large file in chunks of different sizes and you are sharing even 1% of them you are already seeding. And the point of popcorn time is that people are participating the p2p overlay much longer than with other p2p applications, thus seeding longer too.

I understand leechers as those who, over time, mostly download rather than upload.

>people are participating the p2p overlay much longer than with other p2p applications

What makes you say this?

Every client worth looking at allows rates to be adjusted, down to zero, if need be. Case in point http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/blog/en/2008/11/utorrent-3....

The Popcorn Time "catalog" isn't composed of the sort of long-tail movies that need more seeds to stay healthy, though. It's the head of the distribution: the movies which already have thousands of seeders each, and at most 100 leechers at a time.

There is some work being done on having an option to continuously seed the movie even after watching it, but nothing is crystal clear so far.

I think it actually should work better than the usual method. With the old use case, you'll be uploading for the duration of the download, and once it's done, you might stop seeding and start watching your movie or show. But while streaming, you aren't likely to bother to stop seeding while watching, especially if the app doesn't go out of the way to interrupt your show to tell you it's done downloading. So while your average user may be uploading bits in the worst possible order required to keep the file alive, they will likely be uploading them for much longer.

It should keep seeding until the app is closed (so on average potentially a lot longer than the duration of the movie). They could also make it so the app minimizes to the tray, which could lead to even longer average seeding time (some people just close an app because they don't use it right then).

We already have a solution for that - cryptocurrencies. This is the exact situation in mind when bitcoin was created. Seeder gets some bitcoins for streaming the torrent, and leechers pay for the movie in bitcoins. You can seed and download at the same rate to come even. Nobody loses, there's the incentive to seed, everyone's happy. Now we only need system to incorporate crypto into such system. Maybe even into popcorn time fork.

This is a nice idea, but if you're going to pay money for content, doesn't it make a lot more sense to pay it to a legit publisher/distributor rather than a pirate?

Absolutely. The problem is, as always, convincing the legit publisher/distributor to sell you the product you want at a price you find reasonable.

Barring ethical and legal issues, no, not really; the pirates offer a better product. And in some places, they're the only providers at all.

Sure - providing you live in the US and you have a way to pay it to a legit publisher. Where I live, hulu/netflix/itunes are blocked.

Yes, but it seems the publishers aren't that interested in my money. While I do live in a country where I can at least watch Netflix, there's so much content that's not available to me due to artificial licensing constrains.

Piracy is not the answer, but perhaps the only way to get some people to realize that the world is changing.

You seem to have missed the point about coming out even. If you seed to give back you actually come out even or possibly ahead so you aren't actually paying in the long run. Of course that's also a bit of a pyramid scheme because it relies on someone else to be leeching in order to get your money back. If you happen to be one the last ones to watch a movie, or it's one that's been out a while so not many people are interested in watching you may end up net negative. It would have the disadvantage of discouraging people from watching anything but popular movies, of course it would also possibly encourage people to seed less popular stuff.

I pay for a private torrent tracker because it's impossible to get the content (tv/movies) I want. So even if I wanted to pay content creators, I can't. Having said that, I don't feel I'm pirating content simply because, as a consumer, I'm being ignored. So either way content creators wouldn't be getting my money.

Here's where a Proof of Bandwidth system like Bitcloud would come very handy. This way everybody is rewarded automatically in the same measure they contribute (ie seeding).

That would be perfect for a ratio-enforcement scheme that works cross-tracker.

I'm sure there would be ways to game it, but it could go a long way in ensuring the average user gives what they get. It would be awesome to integrate a 'currency' into a similar client, where you slowly earn more by seeding.

You just described how private trackers work. (Except the crypto-proof).

Except that ratio can be falsified easier than cryptocurrency and you can't use ratio for anything else but "buy" movies.

It seems like the ratio system most private trackers already have (and had before bitcoin)

I didn't suggest ratio because of how easy it can be manipulated. Cryptocurrencies solve that problem at least partially.

How would it prevent manipulation?

It wouldn't prevent in itself, but would help by providing unduplicable unit of account. Well, as I think now, it would be almost the same as simple ratio, because I doubt ratio cheating comes from manually editing ratio in database.

That could be adjusted. Maybe program it to say keep the last 5 things you streamed and constantly seed them every time you have the app open.

That way torrents with lots of watchers would be more seeded since their in watched cache of a lot of people.

AFAIK popcorn time is also seeding.

It depends on the size of the swarm or systems consuming the content. For very small swarms, it would be imperative for everyone to contribute, but as the size becomes larger it may not be needed.

Since a streaming app is deadline aware, which is different from a normal torrent. A normal torrent works on fetching either rarest-first or respond-first chunks, while a streaming app tries to fetch chunks linearly and as soon as possible. It is likely to fetch the same chunk from several places (basing them off RTTs (bandwidth-delay) and availability). Moreover, if popcorn inherits BT's congestion control algorithm (LEDBAT, which is a scavenger algorithm) we might not even see spikes in network traffic.

LEDBAT: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6817

The sad thing about Popcorn Time is the way it shows how little people actually care about AV quality. One of the biggest reasons why I personally resort to illegal options (especially with video material) is because of the higher quality they offer compared to legal alternatives, but this aspect is not present in Popcorn Time at all since it sources all the video and audio from YIFY.

YIFY is basically a bunch of morons producing nothing but total garbage who would be better off encoding things in SD with the low bitrates they use. Sadly, since their fork is likely going to be considered the "main" one for Popcorn Time, decent AV quality will probably never be a thing with it. (I found a couple issues on various GitHub forks about this subject and ran into this image[1] which demonstrates the problem quite well.)

EDIT: Well, I guess there's some hope for the future[2]. Not holding my breath, though.

[1] https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1736009/2426834/15aa358e-a...

[2] https://github.com/Yify/popcorn-app/issues/51

> The sad thing about Popcorn Time is the way it shows how little people actually care about AV quality.

What's sad about the fact that different consumers value different things?

In the various discussions about Popcorn Time here and elsewhere, the technical quality of the content has been the subject of discussion multiple times, along with mentions of illegal alternatives offering higher quality than legal ones. By sourcing from YIFY, we're talking about the opposite, though - legal options like Netflix will most definitely offer higher video/audio quality than Popcorn Time.

It's certainly true that different consumers value different things, though. Which is why it's sad that with Popcorn Time my only choices are shit quality or nothing.

>who would be better off encoding things in SD with the low bitrates they use

DCT quantization always beats down-scaling at the same bit rate.

Look at the image I linked and say that again.

And it's not like this is particularly hard to test on your own. If you encode the same video at low enough bitrate X in 480p/720p/1080p, the higher resolution versions can have more definition at times but the 480p version will generally end up having the highest overall quality and is usually the most consistent in its quality as well. I've done this kind of comparing a couple times myself and the results are exactly that.

Comparing still frames from VBR video streams is spurious on multiple levels.

Only if you have a really crummy upscaler on playback; with a good upscaler, DCT starts losing at moderate bitrates and starts to get terrible at low bitrates.

Wait, why are people so quick to download and install these binaries? This is an excellent opportunity to piggyback a virus onto a ton of people's computers, and the "Yify" github profile seems to have no other prior history: https://github.com/Yify

EDIT: Nevermind, it's headed by jduncanator who seems to have done a lot of public work. They also contributed to the original popcorn time.

I don't if it's the same dude|lady|group, but Yify is well known in the torrent scene.

It looks like it is actually affiliated, given that the group's email is github@yts.re

it's also a node-webkit so while one could inject some code in the nodewebkit runtime, most of the code is just html js and css.

This recently happened with the "StealthBit" bitcoin Mac App. The precompiled version on the Github Release page contained additional malicious code not present in the repo:

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/10/bitcoin-stealing-trojan/

It looks like this is just a local web app(?). The only binary I see used is ffmpegsumo.

Given, that can't you just download the repo locally, replace ffmpegsumo with a trusted version from elsewhere, and at least know you aren't running a version that differs from what is on the repo?

They are using node-webkit which means any javascript has unrestricted access to the nodejs api http://nodejs.org/api/. It wouldn't be hard to do something malicious with those low level filesystem, network and process modules.

This seems to be the same YIFY group that releases shitty video transcodes. I wouldn't recomment using the software they offer.

And also the same YIFY group that PopcornTime primairly downloads movies from...

This is not the official repo. The official repository is on https://github.com/popcorn-team/popcorn-app.

That's not even Yify's repository. Probably some holaunblocker guy wanted to take advantage of the news and else to drive traffic to their website.

It's obvious that $8/month for unlimited access to all TV and/or movie content ever created ever just isn't an economic reality. So, how much would you pay on-top of your $8/month Netflix subscription (assuming you have it in your country) for access to new releases? Would you pay another $8 a month? Maybe $12 so it's a round $20 total?

Would you pay $5 to rent a new movie if it could then easily be streaming through Netflix on one of eleventy kazillion devices? What would you be willing to pay?

I would gladly pay the ~$100/month required for decent cable (as in, not basic) to have complete access to all the latest TV shows on-demand. Charge ~$10 extra for Netflix-like access to movies and HBO-level shows.

With the current market, I would pay ~$100 for thousands of hours of content I would never watch, and the shows I do want to watch I'd have to timeshift anyway because I'm busy. That's why I cancelled it, I was paying for an abundance of content I never watched, and the content I did want, I had to download or buy separately.

Of course, this will never happen because production studios want their own little silos.

I'd even pay 50$/month for that kind of system (and I'm a student). But I don't think I'm in the majority.

I'm from the third world. I'd gladly pay double even triple of what you pay for a monthly Netflix subscription if only it was available.

I'm living in Germany. Here, for non-dubbed, easily accessible (on-demand access on every device) and rich (all popular shows, movies and then some) content, I'd gladly pay 100€/month. I hate having to use VPNs to make it look like I'm in the US to receive crappy service.

Netflix isn't compatible with Linux.

I'd prefer buying a downloadable file.maybe 5~20 bucks for a movie. not a fan of streaming services charging per month.

I don't see the usefulness in this. On my Mac it runs very slowly and once you start playing it takes an eternity to jump forward or rewind a little bit. If you just download the movie with torrent in 20 minutes you can jump around instantly and use the much lighter Videolan Player.

I can see the convenience in searching movies though.

Its quite useful for people who cannot download an HD file in 20 minutes.

Those people will have an even worse experience with streaming than the GP.

I don't get what's all the buzz about streaming. Copy the damn file, watch it, and erase (it's a new concept, let's call it "cache"). Not even Youtube works anymore because everything must be online.

> I don't get what's all the buzz about streaming.

There is a noticeable difference between starting to watch a movie in 10 seconds and waiting >15 mins to download completely.

Suppose a movie takes an average 25 minutes to download. I can start watching it in my lunch break if I am streaming it. If I have to download it completely first, I may not have finished downloading it by the end of it.

Streaming is a _much_ better experience, even if it has a bunch of downsides.

It's useful because it does not require you to go to a torrents site, find a reputable torrent, download a bittorrent client, set up your ports, wait for the whole movie to download... do I need to continue? :)

With this, you just click the movie et voilà -- it's something even my grandma could do.

Can’t help being a pedant but the plural of synopsis is synopses. “Synopsis’s” refers to something belonging to a synopsis, e.g. “the synopsis’s true meaning”.

With the Vuze torrent client right click on the file, select "Set Priority" and select "Numeric...".

Next, right click on the file, select "Media Server" and select "Copy Stream URL to Clipboard".

Now open VLC Media Player, select "Media", select "Open Network Stream", paste in the URL and click "Play".

The cool thing about Vuze is that you can use a SOCKS5 proxy and/or restrict traffic to a virtual NIC if you have a VPN. This way even if you turn your VPN off (to play games etc.) you won't be exposed to the swarm.

If you use XBMC you can install the XBMCTorrent add-on which has an interface similar to Popcorn Time. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736

XBMC is cool because you can use the Android app Yatse to control XBMC. If you have two boxes running XBMC (i.e. in your living room and bedroom) you can use Yatse to resume playback on the other box with the push of a button!

Unfortunately, XBMCTorrent and Popcorn Time don't support SOCKS5 proxies or restricting traffic on specific NICs. Therefore you'll want to set up an internet kill switch on your box as a fail safe.

It makes me incredibly happy as an Australian with no access to a Netflix type service (because none exists here) that isn't cable television that costs over $100 per month via Foxtel to be able to stream movies.

Yes, I do feel bad for using apps like this, but I have no other legal and affordable choice. I have Fetch TV which offers movies and additional content bundled with my Internet connection, you get 30 free movies per month (usually older movies) and have to pay for newer ones which can quickly add up if you pay for a few of them.

Popcorn highlights a real problem in the entertainment industry and as someone who's looked into starting a Netflix like service in Australia, the licencing and costs associated with licences and obtaining decent content are way too expensive to even consider starting something up.

Until the situation improves for us Australians and our New Zealand neighbours amongst other countries, people will continue to use apps like this. Learn from Spotify industry heavyweights and open up your content for streaming globally via paid services like Netflix.

You should consider subscribing to Netflix and using a service like Hola Unblocker to access it in Australia. This approach is still illegal but arguably better than torrenting.

Is it really illegal or just violating the TOS? Can you be dragged to court for it or only have the service terminated?

IANAL, but I would say that if you're violating the TOS, you don't have a proper license to the content (since that's contingent upon following the terms), and so you're committing copyright infringement.

On the other hand,

"In relation to the use of VPNs by Australians to access services such as Hulu and Netflix, on the limited information provided there does not appear to be an infringement of copyright law in Australia," a spokesman for Attorney-General Robert McClelland said. "Whether the Australian users have committed an offence by deceiving these providers about their identity, or eligibility to receive their services, would depend on state or territory criminal law."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/technology/media-streams-spa...

It's never been tested in court, but the US AG has repeatedly claimed that violating the TOS is "unauthorized access" which they prosecute as a felony.

You could look into https://www.presto.com.au

Full disclosure, Presto seems to be a subsidiary of Foxtel. It doesn't stream in HD. It costs $19.99 a month (first month is $4.99). It's only movies, no TV.

Presto is indeed a subsidiary of Foxtel

Nice! I want this to continue to grow in popularity and mindshare. It's about time the movie industry stopped being so greedy and selling things using RIDICULOUS drm rules.

Why can I pay $8 for netflix and watch in on my phone, pc, mac, ps3 and ipad - but any newish movie I need to use iTunes and locked there?

You can pay $8 for Netflix because they pay movie studios the prices they ask for the content. You can't watch those same new movies on Netflix because the market value of that content is higher. The DRM allows companies to exploit the price difference between "early adopter" customers and those that will get it later on Netflix.

Same price strategy occurred with hard and softcover books and their release schedules.

Studios should be allowed to charge more for their content when it's new - they'll keep doing this until it's proven the streaming model works out to more money over time. Popcorn Time only hurts that argument as it stands, but could be an interesting Netflix competitor in the pay for play space (peer to peer would save on infrastructure costs)

I agree with the pricing differential stuff, but I'm suspicious about the DRM claim. Is there any evidence that DRM allows companies to exploit the price difference? I always thought it was studios' better marketing and distribution. E.g., people buy real copies of The Incredibles not because DRM keeps it out of the hands of criminals, but because criminals can't sell movies on Amazon or at Walmart.

Also maybe you in the us have netflix

Here in eu I still have nothing similar to a legal film streaming service. NOTHING.

What do you suggest? Should the government restrict the ability of people to set their own prices on the products they offer? Perhaps they can limit your wages too since it's so greedy of you to be making more than a basic liveable wage. What if the government paid for movies to be made then distributed the proceeds to the citizens, each according to his needs? No DRM, no greed.

Is there any content in the popcorn catalog that is known to be license-friendly with popcorn's distribution mechanism?

I want to see the mechanism of popcorn work without violating copyright. I'd like to see a category for 'Creative Commons' or 'Public Domain'.

LOL, just watch a YouTube video of it.

8 years ago I bought a small DVD player for my son from US. I can't use it for any of the DVDs I bought from here, in Romania. But the AVIs will play just fine.

It's weird that the absolute best video experience right now seems to involve Plex plus either piracy or purchasing huge numbers of Blu-Ray and ripping them yourself; it's pretty much your own Netflix, seeded with first-run content, no spying, etc. But you need a seedbox, membership on private torrent sites (which requires either starting from semi-open sites and moving up, or getting direct invites from knowledgeable friends), some effort paid to keep ratio in line, etc.

That's a pretty substantial investment; for $100/mo or more, it's hard to believe the "legit" industry hasn't come out with something like "Netflix that doesn't suck".

As a long-long time XBMC user, this has been my main movie/tv setup for years. Things have changed, I do spend $7 bucks a month on a seedbox, private trackers are the way to go, and yea ratio is pretty key. So way less than $100/mo or even $15/mo on Netflix. And for ratio isn't too hard to maintain if you are always getting the latest content (new movies/episodes) and let them seed for a day or until next weeks show airs your ratio will be top notch.

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

What seed box provider + private torrent sites do you use? I used to be a big fan of demonoid or waffles. But have been out of it for so long that I no longer have an "ins".

http://What.CD for music

http://BroadcasThe.Net for TV

http://PassThePopcorn.me for movies

http://WhatBox.ca for seedbox

My in was What.CD (open interviews). If you want quick access to the other ones then you should get a seedbox on WhatBox. Upload 25GB with your seedbox, and then upload 5 torrents. Now you will be a Power User and have access to the invite forum which has unlimited invites for pretty much every other private tracker (including BTN and PTP).

I thought the rule with private trackers was to try not to name them in public?

Really? I guess I won't do that anymore. Sorry about that.

> But you need a seedbox, membership on private torrent sites

I'm running a fairly automated Torrent+Plex setup without the need for a seedbox or a private torrent site.

Indeed, using public trackers works pretty brilliantly if you watch mostly "popular" movies and TV (not necessarily what everyone watches, but things that people are generally aware exist), and avoid anything less than a few months old.

I think maybe the point of the GP was that using public trackers exposes you to ISP sanctions or even legal ramifications (depending on your jurisdiction) that are less likely on private trackers.

I suppose. This is true for more than just Bittorrent use, though.

If you live in the any country that closely monitors (or has industry-rights organizations that monitor) its citizens' internet activity, then immediately, without fail, go pay the $5/mo or whatever to get a tiny little server somewhere nicer!

You can:

• set your server up as a seedbox

• set up OpenVPN on it (which has been beautifully simplified by Docker-containerization; no need to create and forward an extra bridge interface)

• run an MTA daemon, so you can actually obey the semantics of SMTP (mail is supposed to arrive in your own possession before it's considered "delivered", etc.)

• run an IRC bouncer, or whatever the modern IM-network equivalent of that is (is there one? we've regressed, if not)

• run a web server, e.g. nginx, with (authenticated) WebDAV support enabled, and thus have a place to push arbitrary temporary files when you want to share them by URL

Or, in short, you can fully participate in the Internet.

Disclosure: I'm working on a business in this space. :)

• run an IRC bouncer, or whatever the modern IM-network equivalent of that is (is there one? we've regressed, if not)

The modern equivalent is the IM-network itself. You don't need a bouncer to store messages sent while you were offline or to keep your nickname when the IM servers already do that. If you want to hide your IP, you can just use the VPN.

How obscure is the stuff you download? Just last week I got interested in listening to Kaoru Abe, who was a Japanese avant-garde sax player who I'm pretty sure most people never heard of, and I not only found the album, as it downloaded in just a couple of hours. I frankly never felt that public trackers were lacking in that regard.

Here's what you'll find from him on What, the biggest private music tracker:

http://i.imgur.com/4w8pwvg.png

TPB has nothing from him. You can find some of his albums spread around random public trackers, but it's nothing anywhere close to the convenience and selection available on What.

Fair enough, that does seem extremely comprehensive.

My tastes are pretty eclectic, and the public sites don't really cover those. I also only have 25/12 comcast to home, and trying to do torrenting on private sites with that is painful. My seed box is an atom with 3tb HDD in colo on gige.

Question to anyone who uses this or torrents directly to their PC (rather then via Seedbox). Has anyone heard of anyone that has received notice from their ISP yet for the "6 strikes" changes that went into play?

As soon as I heard about those I transitioned completely to a seedbox setup. It is actually great for media because I can stream directly from my seedbox to my chromecast, but for some things like software / games it would be more convenient to just torrent it directly.

I am basically curious if maintaining an up to date IP block list via peerblock and using only private trackers is enough to keep you off the radar?

I think ISPs gave that up...

No need for the sensationalist title (currently "Popcorn Time is back with a vengeance"). "Popcorn Time build 0.2.7" would suit it fine.

The original Popcorn Time team announced they were stopping the project and their feed of torrents stopped working. So having someone else continue the project fits the headline.

I understand the context, but "back with a vengeance" doesn't exactly fit the rule of "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I suppose "Popcorn time is back" would be an ideal title, but "with a vengeance" doesn't really mean anything so there's no harm done.

"To allow any computer user to watch movies easily streaming from torrents, without any particular knowledge."

The screen shot shows a bunch of very old looking movies, and categories like film-noir and biography. Is there really a vast resource of torrents for all potential movies with enough seeds to stream them for real-time viewing?

I think the idea is that those films are all public-domain.

Right. The actual app supports torrents for movies that have non-free licenses as well.

Those old movies are purposely used in the screenshot because they're public domain examples. The actual library is as modern as up to date as the pirate bay would be :-P

Yify is the top movie uploader on tpb so yeah !

I bet it took some effort to put that fake screenshot together :)

The app is terrific. Can't wait for a revision that includes all the popular tv shows.

Unfortunately I doubt the sparse uploading of most older TV shows means it will be a long time before we see a full-blown netflix competitor.

Moderately popular TV shows that aired last year are fairly difficult to find a complete season of via torrent for example.

I can't see this going bad! [/s]

Interesting, Yify picked it up. If you don't know, Yify is a movie release group.

https://torrentfreak.com/yify-torrents-announces-retirement-...

It would be great if they could build a version for music streaming. Something like spotify...

There's: https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy ...

I wonder if it's the real Yify who did the dev on the popcorn app revival?

Inspired by Popcorn-time, Hacked together a cli tool: Morrent - Command-line Search and Stream Movie Torrent.

https://www.npmjs.org/package/morrent

Uses yts.re API and peerflix.

I played around with the original a bit, and I couldn't find this anywhere; does Popcorn Time support/allow me to require encrypting my torrent traffic?

I wonder what's GitHub opinion on this. What would they do if the government would ask them to remove all code including forks from their site?

fantastic standalone app. I created something similar, a simple movie torrent search engine: http://www.moviemagnet.net I hope people are not discouraged by Popcorn's exit, since torrent based applications should force the issue, old media companies to change their archaic distribution models.

Are you the same owner behind the "original" movies.io, or did you just clone it?

They stopped serving torrents, so I decided to pick up where they left off.

xbmc + xbmctorrent plugin is way better than either popcorn app.

so someone tell me the real risk of me getting sued (or even threatened) by a movie company, by my ISP, by my police department, and then I will use it. maybe

Honeypot trackers log your IP and big media send ISP notices in batch. So you may or may not get a 1st strike warning in the future.

Better to just using a private tracker with semi-lax rules, such as ILoveTorrents.

How is a private tracker going to help if anyone can register an account there?

Three years ago I had to pay about 1000 € in Germany for downloading a music album (I don’t remember which it was, but it certainly wasn’t worth as much). AFAIK there are laws on their way to restrict batch warnings.

The links to downloads 404 for me.

The power of open source.

People breaking the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Digital rights management protects the artists and the publishers from having their rights violated by the criminals who watch movies using Popcorn Time. Furthermore, the creators of Popcorn Time are subject to being accessories to the crime.

> should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law

So - you feel the penalties set down in law are always just and appropriate? And maximum sentences/fines are the ideal that should be aimed for?

What are you trying to say exactly?

"So - you feel the penalties set down in law are always just and appropriate?"

I believe not all penalties set down in law are always just and appropriate, probably even some authorities may see it this way too, but just imagine that you were to ask that question if you were set in front of a judge to justify your piracy acts, do you really think that'll get you out of trouble?

I think instead I will ask myself whether I give a shit how a judge rules on enforcing laws I think are insane.

Non-commercial piracy should be a civil matter, not a criminal one.

Well, I don't see how downloading non-commercial products can be seen as a piracy at all. It would make whole lot sense to me if you were to say that non-commercial software downloading should be a civil matter, not a criminal one, but here we're talking about pirating commercial products in popcorn time, which can be categorized into criminal matter.

I mean non-commercial in the sense that the person doing the downloading (or uploading) isn't doing so to generate a commercial benefit, not whether or not the product being pirated is commercial in nature.

>which can be categorized into criminal matter.

Of course it can be categorised into criminal matter, that's the point: it is, but it shouldn't be.

The existence of Popcorn Time serves as a pretty strong counter-example to the argument that DRM protects IP rights.

I have, however, had technical difficulty playing a movie I legally purchased through iTunes thanks to HDCP deciding it wanted the day off.

Another minor complaint: I want to run my movies through an audio filter I developed to improve stereo imaging on headphones, but I can't really do that with DRM'd content. (Annoyingly, attempting to open a Fairplay-protected item with an AVPlayer object on OS X 10.9 causes the process to be sent SIGKILL.)

Not that I think this justifies piracy, but I do think DRM is a lame non-solution that punishes paying customers while piracy continues to run rampant in spite of it.

Whats the elevator pitch on what this is and what it does?

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