
Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly - hussfelt
http://getpopcornti.me/?hn
======
cheez
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.

~~~
quadrangle
> 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.

~~~
JPKab
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.

~~~
smokeyj
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.

~~~
Zikes
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.

~~~
smokeyj
The reason I think my analogy applies is because "pirating" costs cameramen
nothing. You can measure their net worth before and after I pirate a movie and
it will be the same. The same is not true of bumming a taxi ride.

~~~
Zikes
A cameraman's salary is paid by the movie's budget, which is effectively a
loan against the projected future earnings of a film.

Sure the cameraman already got paid for the film you just pirated, but if said
film doesn't earn enough then the studio will decide to make fewer films or go
bankrupt, either of which could cost the cameraman their job and significantly
reduce future earning potential.

~~~
nightski
But if the movie wasn't worth any money to said person in the first place,
then maybe it isn't such a big loss. Maybe some just do not value cinema
entertainment very much even though they may watch a movie.

~~~
Zikes
Absolutely. Certainly the hypothetical cameraman has no inherent right to be
paid to do whatever they want to do, I only assert that the so-called utopian
pirate market is incapable of sustaining cinema without drastic changes to the
business.

Not to say those changes aren't currently necessary, only that if _everyone_
chose to pirate rather than pay then all of Hollywood would likely just shut
down rather than keep throwing $100+m AAA blockbusters into a financial abyss.

~~~
a8000
Hollywood shutting down would not be a huge loss to the world. Movies of
cultural value could still be funded and then be made available to the public.

~~~
Zikes
That's a highly debatable point. People's definitions of cultural value differ
wildly, and the sort of violence and humor that many people find entertaining
would be difficult to justify seeking public funding for.

------
humanfromearth
If you look at this file here: [https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
app/blob/master/js/t...](https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-
app/blob/master/js/tracking.js)

It sends usage data to Google Analytics. I can see how this can translate into
you getting caught. Be careful.

Even if you don't have a 'trackingId' set it still sends GET requests to
[http://google.com/](http://google.com/)

~~~
MatthewPhillips
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

~~~
laumars
I use SomeoneWhoCares.org:

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

~~~
bendavis381
Well that's an incredibly dangerous command to run without thinking.

~~~
dangirsh
Just curious about what could go wrong (assuming I've quickly skimmed the
file)?

~~~
cdcarter
Quickly skimming the file no longer counts as "running without thinking" but
even then, if the server sent a different file to browsers than it does to
curl...

------
snippyhollow
XBMC torrent has been out there for a while
[http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736](http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=174736)

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

~~~
laacz
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.

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

~~~
Killswitch
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.

~~~
bduerst
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.

------
mikehearn
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.

~~~
bobbonifield
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.

------
d23
> 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."

~~~
hxa7241
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.

~~~
res0nat0r
Many in the music industry who've seen how it looks now vs before MP3s and
high bandwidth came along would disagree.

~~~
mrcharles
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.

------
gabriel34
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.

~~~
wpietri
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.

~~~
gabriel34
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...](http://blog.libtorrent.org/2011/11/writing-a-fast-piece-picker/)

~~~
wpietri
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.

------
t3ra
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.

------
nextstep
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.

~~~
bstrand
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.

------
hershel
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.

~~~
humanrebar
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.

~~~
Zikes
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.

------
alexose
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](https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix))
and video.js
([https://github.com/videojs/video.js/](https://github.com/videojs/video.js/)).

Edit: And, of course, the remarkable (undocumented?) API provided by
subapi.com. Check out
[http://subapi.com/popular.json](http://subapi.com/popular.json) !

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

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

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

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

~~~
w1ntermute
They can just pay off the politicians to throw the developers in jail.

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

------
ihuman
Discussion about Time's article on this piece of software:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7377089)

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

------
cmiles74
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.

------
DevX101
Can someone confirm that the .exe I download is the compiled version of the
github repo?

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

~~~
wernercd
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?

~~~
quasque
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.)

~~~
wernercd
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?

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

Sure there is, and the reason is that the various streaming and rental
services throw lots of money at them (and the physical rental services were
doing this before streaming was even an issue) to get exclusivity, and the
movie producers are profit-maximizing industries.

~~~
wernercd
And the same thing happens: It's more difficult to get "legally" (DRM,
channels, "months" until available in my area/format, etc)? Easier options
will keep popping up.

I'm sure plenty of money got thrown around then, as well as now... but if the
_CUSTOMERS_ aren't given good options? Then they'll go for 'other' options...

Same thing happened with Music until reasonable options appeared.

Same situation for intrusive DRM on Games like always-on-connections (Hello
Sims), CD/DVD checks, nanny software, etc...

When it's easier for pirates - AND they have a better customer experience?
Something is wrong and the market will fight back.

History ignored is a history doomed to repeat itself.

------
slashdotaccount
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.

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

------
prot
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.

------
coretx
"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.

------
robogrowth
Can i beam this with chromecast?

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

------
BerislavLopac
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.

------
qasimvirjee
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...](http://www.designguru.org/blog/110314/popcorn-time-and-simplicity-
pressing-play)

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

~~~
nikolak
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](http://getpopcornti.me/faq)

~~~
zanny
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.

~~~
shawabawa3
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)

~~~
zanny
That is only if you always watch your movie start to finish. If you don't
consume the whole film that number goes up dramatically, say if you watched 5
minutes at a 5MB/1MB connection, then you could download 1.5GB (probably half
the movie) while only seeding 300MB back.

------
shmerl
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.

------
shanusmagnus
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?

~~~
xymostech
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.

------
anjc
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?

~~~
meowface
All those are answered on the website's FAQ.

~~~
anjc
Thanks.

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

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

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

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

------
clienthunter
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.

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

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

~~~
throwwit
But just in time for TPP deliberations.

------
csmattryder
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](http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3#faq1)

~~~
zanny
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.

~~~
adrianm
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.

~~~
zanny
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.

------
captainmuon
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.

------
Doublon
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.

------
alg0rith
>YIFY torrents

Why bother.

~~~
Ziron
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".

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

------
lewaldman
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!!!

------
jokoon
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.

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

~~~
rickyc091
Yep, is it actually legal any where?

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

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

~~~
gambiting
You can disable uploading, for the sake of legality.

~~~
jonathansizz
So then you'd be parasitizing the parasites. I like it (gives them a taste of
their own medicine).

------
1stop
The west finally caught up to china (PPS).

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3327
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"

~~~
sergiotapia
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/](http://fastflick.blogspot.com/)

~~~
yukichan
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.

~~~
sergiotapia
Thanks for LETTING me KNOW?

~~~
lifeformed
"Thanks for _letting_ me _know_ " just looks creepy.

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xpop2027
It would be cool to pay a small fee in order to watch one of these movies
once. Like a digital movie ticket

------
caioariede
Is there a way to stream it over DLNA?

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whitef0x
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.

~~~
VMG
Seems to be open-source: [https://github.com/popcorn-
time](https://github.com/popcorn-time)

------
jypepin
Is there anywhere that explains how streaming from torrent works?

~~~
abustamam
[http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3#faq2](http://www.utorrent.com/help/faq/ut3#faq2)

It works very similarly to streaming anything. When you think about streaming
a video on Netflix, the server sends the movie data to your computer
sequentially, so after it downloads maybe the first 4 minutes, your movie
starts playing, and while your movie plays it continues to download the rest
of the movie.

Streaming via torrent works similarly, except while the movie is playing,
you're also seeding.

It's generally frowned upon to download sequentially via a torrent because
normally, torrent "pieces" are downloaded randomly to ensure that all pieces
are available to everyone evenly. Imagine if everyone were trying to download
the same piece at the same time!

That's it in a nutshell!

------
joeblau
2014 version of Napster.

------
wdewind
A much better solution to this problem is put.io

~~~
maxholnaicher
can you get this to work together with popcorn time ?

------
kphild
Yes! Excellent. In their face.

------
bolonomicz
fucking awesome

------
wathars
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.

~~~
abustamam
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?

