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Is there a glossary of terminology anywhere? I think popcorn time is some kind of application for watching movies, but beyond that, I don't understand many of

Is there a glossary of terminology anywhere? I think popcorn time is some kind of application for watching movies, but beyond that, I don't understand many of the comments in this story. I was into torrents 20 years ago, but I have not kept up with it. Currently, I get my movies from Netflix, and nowhere else, and I'm basically happy with that. Judging from internet comments, I might be the only one.

ogurechny 3y ago
There is a giant market for one-click piracy solutions for the technologically illiterate. It's actually the same market on which legal services operate. Their competitors are streaming sites, various pay-to-pirate services that promise to do your work for you, and applications that combine torrents coming from popular catalogues with covers and descriptions from general purpose services into a nice interface. Choose a movie, and downloading starts in the background without the need to figure anything out. The latest and greatest Hollywood hits always have peers, and the rest does not really interest the general public. Because the users self-select for laziness and blind trust, it's a perfect feeding ground for malware operators, just like “system optimizer” and “system cleaner” applications are. Clients like “Zona” or “MediaGet” can sometimes be seen in torrent peer lists, and it's a common joke among tech support crowd that if one of those is installed, for some reason, the system always has malware to clean. Of course, the only “official” version may not display any unwanted behavior — at least initially — but there are 50 other sites in the search results with totally not suspicious installers. The other thing is there is no “deep learning” here. Authors do not scan ALL the available torrents and figure out which is which, they simply use metadata filled in by users in catalogues. Those are the same torrents anyone can find and download.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
It's a torrent client that is able to download the torrent file sequentially, rather than in random chunks. Meaning you can stream a movie torrent instead of the old-fashioned method of needing to wait for the entire thing to download before you can watch. It's a combination torrent client and media player.
- ogurechny 3y ago
  Any decent torrent client (apart from Transmission?) has had sequential downloading for years. It was never a unique feature of those idiot-oriented wrappers.
  - EasyMark 3y ago
    Well it combines website lookup + bittorrent client + viewer. If you're happy with apps that you use for that then popcorn time doesn't really bring anything to the table except the all-in-one solution.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    Popcorn Time is 10 years old. Sequential downloading wasn't as common then, and the torrenting community had very mixed feelings about integrating sequential downloads at the time. It was (still is) good for leechers and bad for seeders.
    - ogurechny 3y ago
      It is a tool. “Good” and “bad” are views of that tool that humans have. If two or more people are fine with transferring the pieces sequentially, there is nothing wrong with that, and no “hurting” of any “network” happens. Setting it as default for every user of some client would be bad on average, and bittorrent has enough math to ensure balanced distribution of pieces in various common and corner cases by default. However, it is quite irrelevant for torrents with hundreds or thousands of peers. They don't have availability problems, and the fairness of data downloaded and uploaded depends on too many random factors anyway. Say, if you have a client seeding just a couple of torrents which connects to peers quickly, and I have a client with a lot of torrents, and slow peer rotation, you are going to serve more data to more peers than me on the same torrent. 20 year old discussions reasoning about possible peers with modem speeds and metered connections are not completely correct today. You probably need to have terabytes of data to transfer to start caring about which approach is more fault tolerant and more fair, or notice the difference.
    - ogurechny 3y ago
dylan604 3y ago
> I get my movies from Netflix, and nowhere else, and I'm basically happy with that Mr. Hastings, is that you? The Netflix library has become so small and full of crap, that I find it hard to honestly accept that anyone could be satisfied with that alone.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > The Netflix library has become so small and full of crap, that I find it hard to honestly accept that anyone could be satisfied with that alone. 260 million paying households around the world disagree. In last quarter alone, 13 million new households started subscribing. https://apnews.com/article/netflix-fourth-quarter-results-video-streaming-subscriber-growth-b4803e9cd07897dfb928b4064fc35657 https://apnews.com/article/netflix-fourth-quarter-results-vi...
  - imafish 3y ago
    I am a paying customer. Mostly due to my kids enjoying a lot of their stuff. It used to have a decent amount of content for me - but as time went, I just found less and less interesting content and now I no longer bother to even browse Netflix.
  - yur3i__ 3y ago
    260M households does not equal 260M satisfied with Netflix alone. Almost everyone I know with Netflix also has at least one, if not both, of Disney+ or Prime Video
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Thanks for confirming that I didn't imply something that the GP read into it. They posted numbers like they were well informed, but conveniently left out of those numbers that you pointed out had more than 1 subscription that you've pointed out. I just didn't think this was something that needed to be pointed out in an honest conversation, and would only be needed by shills for Netflix
      - 3y ago

ogurechny 3y ago

There is a giant market for one-click piracy solutions for the technologically illiterate. It's actually the same market on which legal services operate. Their competitors are streaming sites, various pay-to-pirate services that promise to do your work for you, and applications that combine torrents coming from popular catalogues with covers and descriptions from general purpose services into a nice interface. Choose a movie, and downloading starts in the background without the need to figure anything out. The latest and greatest Hollywood hits always have peers, and the rest does not really interest the general public. Because the users self-select for laziness and blind trust, it's a perfect feeding ground for malware operators, just like “system optimizer” and “system cleaner” applications are. Clients like “Zona” or “MediaGet” can sometimes be seen in torrent peer lists, and it's a common joke among tech support crowd that if one of those is installed, for some reason, the system always has malware to clean. Of course, the only “official” version may not display any unwanted behavior — at least initially — but there are 50 other sites in the search results with totally not suspicious installers. The other thing is there is no “deep learning” here. Authors do not scan ALL the available torrents and figure out which is which, they simply use metadata filled in by users in catalogues. Those are the same torrents anyone can find and download.

squeaky-clean 3y ago

It's a torrent client that is able to download the torrent file sequentially, rather than in random chunks. Meaning you can stream a movie torrent instead of the old-fashioned method of needing to wait for the entire thing to download before you can watch. It's a combination torrent client and media player.

ogurechny 3y ago
Any decent torrent client (apart from Transmission?) has had sequential downloading for years. It was never a unique feature of those idiot-oriented wrappers.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  Well it combines website lookup + bittorrent client + viewer. If you're happy with apps that you use for that then popcorn time doesn't really bring anything to the table except the all-in-one solution.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  Popcorn Time is 10 years old. Sequential downloading wasn't as common then, and the torrenting community had very mixed feelings about integrating sequential downloads at the time. It was (still is) good for leechers and bad for seeders.
  - ogurechny 3y ago
    It is a tool. “Good” and “bad” are views of that tool that humans have. If two or more people are fine with transferring the pieces sequentially, there is nothing wrong with that, and no “hurting” of any “network” happens. Setting it as default for every user of some client would be bad on average, and bittorrent has enough math to ensure balanced distribution of pieces in various common and corner cases by default. However, it is quite irrelevant for torrents with hundreds or thousands of peers. They don't have availability problems, and the fairness of data downloaded and uploaded depends on too many random factors anyway. Say, if you have a client seeding just a couple of torrents which connects to peers quickly, and I have a client with a lot of torrents, and slow peer rotation, you are going to serve more data to more peers than me on the same torrent. 20 year old discussions reasoning about possible peers with modem speeds and metered connections are not completely correct today. You probably need to have terabytes of data to transfer to start caring about which approach is more fault tolerant and more fair, or notice the difference.
  - ogurechny 3y ago

dylan604 3y ago

> I get my movies from Netflix, and nowhere else, and I'm basically happy with that Mr. Hastings, is that you? The Netflix library has become so small and full of crap, that I find it hard to honestly accept that anyone could be satisfied with that alone.

andsoitis 3y ago
> The Netflix library has become so small and full of crap, that I find it hard to honestly accept that anyone could be satisfied with that alone. 260 million paying households around the world disagree. In last quarter alone, 13 million new households started subscribing. https://apnews.com/article/netflix-fourth-quarter-results-video-streaming-subscriber-growth-b4803e9cd07897dfb928b4064fc35657 https://apnews.com/article/netflix-fourth-quarter-results-vi...
- imafish 3y ago
  I am a paying customer. Mostly due to my kids enjoying a lot of their stuff. It used to have a decent amount of content for me - but as time went, I just found less and less interesting content and now I no longer bother to even browse Netflix.
- yur3i__ 3y ago
  260M households does not equal 260M satisfied with Netflix alone. Almost everyone I know with Netflix also has at least one, if not both, of Disney+ or Prime Video
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Thanks for confirming that I didn't imply something that the GP read into it. They posted numbers like they were well informed, but conveniently left out of those numbers that you pointed out had more than 1 subscription that you've pointed out. I just didn't think this was something that needed to be pointed out in an honest conversation, and would only be needed by shills for Netflix
    - 3y ago