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Popcorn Time Is Back
- inoffensivename 4y agoI thought this was the POP-CORN phone number, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_clock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_clock, now I definitely feel old
- tamaharbor 4y ago
- kbarmettler 4y agoAs a northern californian, same. I could almost hear my mom telling me to call popcorn so I could reset the VCR clock after a power outage
- kilroy123 4y agoWow that really takes me back!
- soared 4y agoThis looks like apks and no desktop apps, is that accurate? I’ll never forget the warm cozy feeling I got when my isp sent me a letter listing the the movies I had pirated over popcorn time.
- bragr 4y agoHow did that work? Did they monitor the swarms? Fingerprint the chunks?
- bawolff 4y agoMovie studio hires company to monitor bittorrent trackers/dht, send letter to isp, isp forwards the letter to you (legally required in some juridsictions, e.g. canada) In many cases this is a pgp signed xml document, which is bizarre as i have no idea what an average person would make of that.
- walrus01 4y agoThe XML is supposed to be used by the ISP receiving the dmca notice, with their internal automation systems, to determine what subscriber had a specific ip address in a DHCP pool at that point in time. Then generate an email outbound to the customer's email in the billing system db.
- npteljes 4y agoYou can query trackers and DHT for torrents, and they return a bunch of IPs that are seeding/downloading the torrent. And then, as an ISP, you can combine IPs to subscriptions. Check out this website that does the IP querying part for you: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/ https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/
- Rerarom 4y agoWow! I never thought there were records of that.
- TechBro8615 4y agoThere’s a Defcon talk circa 2013 about crawling DHTs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvQrNoCwxgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvQrNoCwxgE
- anacrolix 4y agoThere's also magnetico: http://magnetico.org/ http://magnetico.org/
- npteljes 4y agoI just get a rickroll gif on your link. Did you mean this project? "Autonomous (self-hosted) BitTorrent DHT search engine suite." https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico
- Rerarom 4y agoI don't get a rickroll, I get a redirect to the address you posted.
- TechBro8615 4y agoI also got RR’d when I clicked the other day. It’s working now though. But it’s an http link so who knows. Anyway, that repo is archived now. But I did find a more modern iteration of the idea: https://github.com/dennis-tra/nebula-crawler https://github.com/dennis-tra/nebula-crawler
- senectus1 4y agoI always got very amused when i got these letters... the stuff they claimed my IP had downloaded, was definitely not downloaded on my network. rotating IP addresses made the warnings pointless.
- cute_boi 4y agoCan't they use DHCP leases? Thankfully, ISP doesn't show that much effort.
- silisili 4y agoEven if they weren't too lazy to, an IP doesn't and can't identify a person or even household. Must be my neighbors downloading movies on my open wifi network, I can't figure out these high tech router thingymajigs ;).
- elcomet 4y agoIn France it's an offence to not configure securely your network if there's some illegal stuff happening on it. You are held responsible for any downloads on your own network.
- RHSeeger 4y agoIf that's the case, then it should be illegal for companies to sell devices that have issues that can be exploited in them.
- silisili 4y agoRight? Seems like half of consumer routers have or have had an open exploit. I believe the GP, but can't see it being enforced.
- mod 4y agoThat must be tough on the ISPs.
- depressedpanda 4y agoThe desktop app can be found here: https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop
- spurgu 4y agoDoes this work on Mac M1? I tried a couple of days ago and IIRC it segfaulted.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoIf you're gonna do this stuff always always always use a VPN, and not a free VPN. Honestly I use a VPN for literally everyhing. My two mobile phones and 3 PCs and a home server. If I can't get to a site because they block VPNs then fuck them I'll spend my money somewhere else.
- hackernewds 4y agoWhat are good VPNs to use?
- jerojero 4y agoMullvand is the best I've found. It's a bit expensive though.
- Crespyl 4y agoI'll second the Mullvad recommendation. I don't even care that much about torrents or geo-locked stuff, I just trust them more than my ISP. Setup was incredibly smooth and straightforward. IIRC Mozilla also re-sells Mullvad's service under a name like (IIRC) FireFox VPN, which, last I'd heard, was still the only way to directly fund development of the browser.
- brewdad 4y agoAgreed. I was a happy Mullvad customer for a few years until Proton offered me a deal that was too good to pass up. I like to change up my VPN provider and/or account every couple of years anyway so I'll probably go back to Mullvad when my current term is up.
- Dylan16807 4y ago> IIRC Mozilla also re-sells Mullvad's service under a name like (IIRC) FireFox VPN, which, last I'd heard, was still the only way to directly fund development of the browser. Which is a nice thing but you can't forward ports, and forwarding ports is a big benefit Mullvad has especially for torrents.
- grishka 4y agolaughs in third-world country
- underlines 4y agolaughts in Switzerland, where you can torrent what ever the heck you want with your 25gbps/25gbps FTTH connection from Init7 for 60USD/month and providers don't do QOS or DPI and there's no limit in how many terrabytes you're torrenting.
- buchoo 4y agoWhy would they list the movies? Seems counterproductive since you could then broadcast which torrents are monitored.
- zagrebian 4y agoIs there a reason why this couldn’t be a web app that works everywhere, desktop and mobile?
- donkarma 4y agoWould love to see integration for this in media servers, or even Sonarr/Radarr integration for on-demand films and such
- love2read 4y agoat that point why not just use a discord bot to hit sonarr/radarr.
- stiltzkin 4y agonzb360
- a254613e 4y agoIf you're interested in the discovery or the ease of use part of it, you may be interested in https://github.com/sct/overseerr https://github.com/sct/overseerr - it integrates with the mentioned software, and it's beautifully done. I have this in combination with *arr stack, and even the non technical family members use it without any issues.
- asdff 4y agoIt's been back. I don't think it ever left? There's been a couple recent updates but I wish they would give the desktop build some more attention to ux. I open it and it makes my computer unresponsive for a minute or two before the application window appears and lets me do things beyond wiggling my cursor across the otherwise frozen screen. The reddit link on the github page also still points to the old banned subreddit instead of the current one.
- lawgimenez 4y agoI’m currently digging their Android source code and it is so outdated that it sent out a warning to upgrade the project’s gradle plugin from 3.5.* to 7.*.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y agoI used to use Popcorn Time for a while when all I watched my movies on was on my old HTC Sensation XE with a 540p display, 11 years ago. Now, I've upgraded to a nice 55" OLED, and I can't move away from Blu-ray rips. The sheer size of these rips (~25-70 GB) will burn through my data plan in an hour flat, not to mention that even with a 4G connection, it might be a little hard for a sporadically-seeded torrent to keep up with the bit-rate required for the film to play without buffering. Even so, great effort bringing it back again; I had great fun with it when I did use it.
- betwixthewires 4y agoI don't see the point anymore. Lots of torrent software allows sequential downloads, so I can play them as they are downloaded, assuming the download speed is faster than the length of the video, in a video player of my choice. Usually though when I decide to watch something I pick it for that night, add it and watch it when I'm ready, so streaming is not really a problem I need solved.
- alexb_ 4y agoStreaming isn't a problem YOU need solved, but why exactly would that affect everyone else who does want that solved?
- betwixthewires 4y agoWell my point is that it's a solved problem that doesn't require a special client. Torrent clients allow sequential downloads, and people can use any source for torrents they like and play in any player they want. You can stream torrents without popcorntime.
- quickthrower2 4y agoHooray! ∴ ∴∴∴∴∴ ∴ \∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴∴/ \∴∴∴∴∴∴∴/ ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
- kaichanvong 4y agothis graphic-design technique (that uses computers) for presentation is known as ASCII art. I read somewhere it is sorted into almost 550 categories (in 1 collection online)!
- Sunspark 4y agoIf popcorn time would also add streaming of live events functionality, they would completely capture the old acestream market that would still be interested.
- herbst 4y agoAre live events distributed over torrents a thing? I would imagine a general delay of several minutes by design
- fsflover 4y agoYou can stream with PeerTube with a 30-seconds delay.
- voxadam 4y agoI'm not an expert on the protocols I can't imagine there's any reason you couldn't serve near-live content using HLS or MPEG-DASH over BitTorrent.
- OmarAssadi 4y agoWith the demographics of HN and some of the topics that come up often (e.g., Linux, privacy, nostalgia for old-school forums, weird little micro-optimizations of peoples' lifestyles to achieve the "best" possible way to do a certain thing, etc.), I have always been a little bit surprised to see quite how many people personally use tools like Popcorn Time and how little mention of some forms of filesharing there is. I think it is worth looking into private trackers for anyone a bit more interested in media than the average person. - There is almost no need to use any VPN service on these sites. - Quality control is unmatched; many sites have strict rules on what can be uploaded and general standards of uploads. Often this means that each torrent has mandatory screenshots for video quality comparisons, consistent track orders for bilingual releases, MediaInfo/BDInfo to allow you to know the contents before downloading (e.g., codecs, languages, audio channels, bitrates, etc.), source information to know what version of a film or series you're watching, and full ripping logs in the case of CDs/vinyl, etc. - There are also usually limited slots for torrents in a particular group (e.g., on some sites, a single film may have one or two 1080P encodes, one or two 720P encodes, one remux of the Blu-ray, and one untouched disc unless there are multiple significantly different masters available), meaning lower-quality releases will be trumped, removing the need to compare releases and pick. You can be confident you are downloading something decent on the first attempt. - There is a tremendous amount of obscure, foreign, and rare content that cannot be found on public sources or streaming services. As an anecdote, take Ma vie en rose, a Belgian movie I wanted to watch. It wasn't on any streaming services with English subtitles, the American DVD was out of print, and the only HD release at the time was a Blu-ray for the Japanese market without English subs. While it was impossible to find on any public tracker or streaming service, I immediately found someone who took the effort and money to buy the DVDs for the subs, manually OCRed them to SRTs, purchased and ripped the Japanese Blu-ray, and remuxed it with the newly created English subs into a nice, single MKV for easy consumption. - Almost everything is well-seeded. Private trackers usually incentivize long-term retention of downloads, so regardless of how old something is, you can usually still download a copy. - The community. Many complain about opening up Netflix to a sea of overwhelming, infinite choices and being stuck just trying to pick anything. An advantage of the niche-specific private trackers compared to streaming services, public trackers, and Usenet, though, is that there are usually "collages" or lists of some sort where users will maintain what is essentially those IMDb lists or the random top-10 article-spam you'll find on Google, except it's all hand-picked content by people who are seriously, genuinely, and perhaps overly interested in the topic you're browsing. I rarely struggle to find something to watch/listen to because I can dial in a specific thing I am after, and someone will usually have already put in the effort of curating a list of the best content I have never heard of. - And again, with regards to the community, the knowledge is cool. For anyone interested in the technical side of some of these topics, a lot of discussion and information is, unfortunately, locked up on member-only forums (not to mention the resources - e.g., for those interested in anime encoding & fansubbing, some of the Chinese trackers, in particular, are so valuable, be it for the untouched DVDs/Blu-ray sources or the guides and tools). And don't get me wrong, I don't mean to sound like some insane person. I completely recognize that not everyone wants to/can dedicate the time, there is a barrier to entry, and it may simply not be how most people would like to consume media, etc. I also don't mean for this to sound negative about Popcorn Time -- it is very cool and solves real problems for many people. I am not that out of touch (I hope); I am just passionate ;-) Consume what you'd like, how you'd like, but I thought it might be worth proselytizing a little while I have the opportunity!
- SlashmanX 4y agoAwh this brings me back. I was a large contributor to the desktop version of this incarnation of PT, focusing on the ability to play on external applications and Chromecasts and also adding TV Shows. I remember having such a eureka moment when I finally figured out how to get subtitles working when streaming live to a Chromecast
- john2x 4y ago> get subtitles working when streaming live to a Chromecast Teach me your ways, sensei.
- SlashmanX 4y agoMy code still exists in the desktop source[1] but essentially what you need to do is convert an srt to vtt [2] file and start a local http server that will serve the VTT file [3] and point the Chromecast to that [1] - https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/development/src/app/lib/device/chromecast.js#L98 https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/dev... [2] - https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/development/src/app/lib/subtitle/generic.js#L138 https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/dev... [3] - https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/development/src/app/lib/subtitle/server.js https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/blob/dev...
- stef25 4y agoIsn't it possible to "burn" the subtitles on to the video file somehow, maybe with ffmpeg? So they're there permanently.
- mperdemata 4y agoyes, the container formats such as MP4 and Matroshka support this. Also, it can be definitely done with ffmpeg.
- worble 4y ago
- deltaonefour 4y agoTry stremio. It's a completely legal app, that's still updated. But it becomes just like popcorn time after you download a few plugins. And those plugins are downloadable from within the app itself.
- icemelt8 4y ago
- kuramitropolis 4y agoSeems sus
- DavideNL 4y agoWeird title... how about "is back on Android" or something.
- cy_overlord 4y agoPopcorn Time felt more web3 than all crypto combined.
- divs1210 4y agoAgreed!
- sph 4y agoIndeed, web3 should be decentralisation & P2P to move away from silos, not crypto bullshit.
- travjones 4y ago
- julius_deane 4y agoleave it to the HN to complain about demonisation of scamtech
- smcl 4y agoMy impression is that overall HN was generally enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies and the tech powering them until a few recent scandals and scams. To be honest that is just broadly similar to public opinion (or at least, the portion of the public who have heard of cryptocurrencies)
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- Jhsto 4y agoGiven some of the people here might run their own servers, the self-hosted alternative is to have something like Sonarr PVR for newsgroups and torrents, alongside a tracker indexer like Jackett, and then Plex for the frontend. In this combination, you "subscribe" to TV shows and select movies on the Sonarr system, and then the downloading is taken care for you even when new episodes arrive. These will then appear on Plex which is refreshed by the pipeline automatically. The system integrates with private trackers and is capable of maintaining your seed-ratio if that's important. I recently fell into this rabbit-hole while trying to organise my music. For music there is Lidarr, which also ID3 tags your music and reorganizes it into folder structures. This is convenient since organizing anything using Plex is a nightmare.
- londons_explore 4y agoIt would be nice to have popcorn time itself allow the server URL to be edited, so you can either use public servers or your own private one. I don't really see why the same code can't be used for both - it seems such a waste of effort to rebuild everything twice for the only slightly different usecases.
- geuis 4y ago> It would be nice to have popcorn time itself allow the server URL to be edited You can edit it. The option is in the settings.
- londons_explore 4y agoI don't see it...
- nivenkos 4y agoI use vopono to run (only) Jackett through a VPN connection too. It feels great when it all works together.
- sph 4y ago
- SimonZerafa 4y agoNone of the domains are back so I wonder how "official" this update might be? Has anyone reviewed the source for possible unintended or intended side effects?
- stereoradonc 4y agoGreat news!
- planede 4y agoWhy on Github?
- developerDan 4y agoBecause that’s where it’s been?
- planede 4y agoAnd that's where it was taken down, if I remember correctly.
- dizhn 4y agoA lot happened in the years since the official popcorn time disappeared. Nowadays you can use stremio (or kodi) with something like real-debrid to get instant high speed links to most everything on torrent sites.
- _joel 4y agoAnybody actually got anything working (tv apk)? Hangs a lot and sits waiting for seeds (network is fine, DNS set to usable servers)
- gw67 4y agoCould be possible to build Popcorn using IPFS for torrent file storage?