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Popcorn Time in Your Browser
- iM8t 11y agoI love the idea, but what about copyright issues? It's easier for Hollywood to take down a single site than to take down thousands of people having an installed application. Other than that - great implementation. I didn't know this was even possible! Good job.
- mavdi 11y agoIt's back to the good old Whac-A-Mole game. Here is a list of blocked domains in the UK, which has grown insanely in last year alone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the...
- VeejayRampay 11y agoPopcorn Time has succeeded in streamlining the delivery of content, providing a smooth and fast experience for sorting through a list of movie and start watching instantly. I really wonder why the movie studios cannot take a cue from this and build something that people actually want to use.
- nothrabannosir 11y agoI never used either, so I'm genuinely curious: what does Netflix lack, from that list?
- pja 11y agoBreadth of content? Otherwise, Netflix is pretty solid.
- sz4kerto 11y agoAvailability and content. I'd be very happy to use Netflix if a) it were available around here* b) if it provided the same selection as in the US *: random country in the EU
- qubex 11y agoAs somebody in the same predicament and locale, I often find myself wondering whether it is any less objectionable to rent a VPN connection through the States.
- timrichard 11y agoI've done the same thing. Used a VPN to access Netflix US in Britain, for some newer BBC stuff that I've already contributed to through the license fee...
- wooger 11y agoThis 1000x. iPlayer is lauded, and generally works well, but it has incredibly restrictive, short term availability of content entirely paid for by taxpayers. It is unclear how anyone in the UK can benefit from TV programmes removed from this service, or WHY any content for which the BBC doesn't have permanent distribution rights (via iPlayer) should ever be funded or produced by the BBC.
- kriro 11y agoI'm pretty sure the problem wouldn't be the VPN but rather the payment. Iirc they only accept US based credit cards/paypal for Netflix US. I researched it briefly a while back before Netflix was available here. It's not impossible to get around but getting a CC from another country and the like quickly leads to pretty shady websites.
- germanier 11y agoI pay for US Netflix with my German credit card each month, it is charged in US dollar.
- rmc 11y agoThat could be illegal. Check the terms & conditions. You might as well pirate if you're going to break the law.
- efdee 11y agoI very much enjoyed Netflix while staying with family in the US. In Belgium, however, the available content is so limited that it's just not worth it. Not even Friends, Simpsons, X-Files, nothing.
- jenscow 11y agoI don't know the details, but this could be due to local TV stations buying exclusivity for this content in your country.
- izacus 11y agoNothing, but it does gain another thing - text saying "I'm sorry, not available where you live." Which is kind of a dealbreaker.
- driverdan 11y agoNetflix has a very limited, poor selection of content. Every single movie I've tried to watch on Netflix in the past month hasn't been available for streaming.
- VeejayRampay 11y agoNetflix has very little content and isn't available everywhere.
- path411 11y agoYou have to wait 3 months after a movie has been released to DVD for it to even have a chance of being on Netflix to "help encourage" DVD sales.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoIt's much easier to streamline something when you don't have to follow any of the rules. The movie industry has to think of distribution agreements, localising content and maximising profit - just like any other business. When you have nothing to lose you can do what you want. I guess they've gotten close to this with Netflix. There are still geo-restrictions there and not all content is available but for most people with access there is enough. Also if you want the latest content (which isn't on Netflix) you can probably buy it from iTunes. Again not available everywhere but available in quite a lot of places. When you look at how easy this content is to access now compared with 10 or 15 years ago when you had to have a video store membership, hope no one else had rented the copy, pay crazy prices, and remember to bring it back when you were done, I find it hard to believe people's biggest problem (and main reason for pirating) is ease of access. It's price plain a simple. People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't. I've done it in the past and it was almost never about ease of access. It was about money.
- soft_dev_person 11y ago> People have the option of not paying so a lot of them won't. But a lot of them will. They will pay for ease of access, legal access, and a good user experience. If the industry had focused its energy on those willing to pay instead of those not willing to pay, maybe the UX Popcorn Time provides today would have been available as a legal subscription based service. Just look at Spotify. Yes, a lot of people still don't pay for the music they consume, but a lot of people do. Pirating of music has certainly seen a decline, even if we may never get rid of it completely.
- adam74 11y agoI really don't think this is a better experience than Netflix or pay-per-view on my tv. The only thing that is better is that I don't have to pay for it. The movies actually take a lot longer to load on this.
- cmiles74 11y agoI honestly do not believe that the movie studios are motivated to improve the current system. Perhaps they feel that the current, fractured delivery system serves their interest more than something central and comprehensive. It certainly encourages the customer to subscribe to a service like Netflix, perhaps also to rent a new release on iTunes and eventually possibly buying that same release when its price drops. That's getting paid three times for the same content!
- r00fus 11y agoBingo. The goal of the movie industry is simply to make more money, and to prevent any challenge to their stranglehold on content... if that is achieved by balkanized delivery systems, that's what they will push for.
- rhino369 11y agoMovie studios have the least exposure to piracy risk other than online multiplayer games and console games. You can't get a good copy of a movie until DVDs and brs are released. Cams and TSs are terrible. If something like popcorn time went mainstream they would just stop releasing disc media and downloads until well after the theatre stopped playing. TV is the industry that should be worried. If popcorn time goes mainstream we'll never see high budget cable content ever again. Just 100% low budget sitcoms, soap operas and reality TV. But not with constant in show advertising that scenesters can't edit out.
- tmikaeld 11y agoSeems to be getting the file from: https://coinado.io https://coinado.io So with this, i really question the "privacy" and legality of this service and coinado.io.
- czechdeveloper 11y agoPopcorn time never pretended to be legal. It just provided great user experience to "old" torrenting.
- tmikaeld 11y agoOf course, i don't think i even mentioned Popcorn.
- shawabawa3 11y agoCoinado should be legal as far as I can tell - in the same way a torrent client is perfectly legal. They may have to respond to takedown requests or similar though, but seeing as how they only know the hash it will be a lot easier for them to claim ignorance I'm not sure what your privacy concerns are... You can track clients downloading torrents pretty easily, if anything this would help as it adds another layer of indirection
- tmikaeld 11y agoThey are providing direct streams/links to the downloaded files on popcorn. The issue is that that has nothing to do with torrents - it's a direct link to the FILE of the movie, plain and simple.
- shawabawa3 11y agoOh, i'm sure popcorninyourbrowser is totally illegal and will probably be shutdown soon. coinado seems like it should be ok though
- runn1ng 11y agoNote: this depends on https://coinado.io https://coinado.io, that's for free only for a limited time After they start charging actual money (...well, Bitcoin), this will stop working.
- egeozcan 11y agoThis reminds me of joker[1], with the benefit of not expecting you to feed it a torrent (or expecting you to know what a torrent is). I genuinely wonder, though, if these services are published just to annoy the copyright owners or for some benefit to the author that I sadly cannot see. edit: They also do not seem to serve ads. Maybe an experiment for a potential legal version? Who knows... [1]: currently out of service, used to be available at http://joker.org/ http://joker.org/ , discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520954
- verbin217 11y agoBecause fuck media conglomerates, that's why. Sorta like Google Chrome: because fuck Microsoft, that's why. When an entity achieves dominance they only innovate in order to keep it. The difference between this situation and the one I compared it to is that there's no way to legitimately compete. Even in the contrasting example it took an entity the size of Google to revive competition. In this one they control the content and dictate the platform. The most competitive platforms, in terms of user preference, can be starved of content and displaced by alternatives only the media conglomerates could desire. Do you honestly think we'd have gotten Netflix without torrents? The people who desire progress or otherwise to actually do things have two choices. They can either repress that desire or they can out-hack the regressive empire builders who desire only to have things.
- _lce0 11y agoyep, they are called _barrier to entry_[0], and those big conglomerates have huge barriers, being the current legislation the biggest.. the question is if they will be able to handle the economy of scale of the whole world trying to move forward --I hope not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry
- DigitalSea 11y agoYou know the traditional business model of Hollywood is well and truly broken when an open source application like Popcorn Time comes along and does everything right. What Popcorn Time has done by making accessing content on demand easier than ever before is nothing short of impressive. They're the Netflix of piracy and I think Hollywood can learn a lot from Popcorn Time (but as history has proven, they won't).
- xasos 11y ago> Hollywood can learn a lot from Popcorn Time (but as history has proven, they won't). This happened to the music industry with Napster, but they learned a little too late. Now Spotify is the dominant force in the music streaming business.
- Narkov 11y agoEverything right? Except of course monitize it. Giving stuff away is pretty easy to do. Making a business out of it is much harder.
- k-mcgrady 11y ago>> Everything right? Except of course monitize it. And funding/creating it. Anyone can take something they don't own and give it away for free. Investing in its creation and ensuring that investment is successful is much more difficult and limits your options for distribution.
- rkangel 11y agoGiven the technical restrictions on sharing illegal content, due to copyright laws shutdown of websites etc., sharing illegal content isn't that easy to do. That someone has managed to do it in as user friendly a manner as they have, putting everything in the industry to shame (apart from Netflix) is in an indication of the failings of the industry. Netflix is a great product that falls down only in terms of content. If Netflix had more TV shows as box sets, and new episodes of currently being broadcast TV seasons, I would happily pay 10 times as much as I do (no exaggeration) and never use anything else legal or otherwise. The resistance that the established industry has to making deals to enable that sort of service is the reason that Popcorn Time can beat them.
- cekanoni 11y agoThat's amazing i love popcorn. But i cant see the latest movies that are in popcorn app ?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- amazon_not 11y agoDoes not appear to work, at least not on an iPad. Media player either does not start playback or issues a timeout.
- cliveowen 11y agoNot working on Chrome on Mac OS X 10.9.5, either.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoWorks on that combo for me. In what way is it "not working"?
- ConAntonakos 11y agoSame. Couldn't get it to work.
- feross 11y agoEvery few months, someone builds a site like this. It lasts for a few days (or weeks) at best before it's shutdown due to legal pressure or sheer cost for the owner. I'm going to ignore the piracy aspect of this site (since I don't support copyright infringement) and just talk about the implementation. This site is connecting to a centralized service to fetch the torrent data. It's not P2P, it's easy to censor, and it likely won't be around for long. What we really need is a true P2P implementation of BitTorrent in the browser. I'm working on just such a project: WebTorrent (http://webtorrent.io http://webtorrent.io). You can see a demo here: https://instant.io https://instant.io Here is a link to watch Sintel (Creative Commons 3.0): https://instant.io/#c6642b73cf82dc52b5d538fabfdf9c8e3d9e850f https://instant.io/#c6642b73cf82dc52b5d538fabfdf9c8e3d9e850f WebTorrent is powered by WebRTC, the de-facto standard for connecting two peers in the web browser. It even works in desktop apps (via Electron or NW.js) and mobile apps (via embedding the webrtc.org library). With WebRTC, we can connect all types of endpoints (desktop, web, mobile) directly and completely P2P. This is the underlying transport that all future P2P protocols should be built upon. Right now, the primary limitation of WebTorrent in the browser is that you can't just paste in any random magnet uri or .torrent file and have it work. The torrent must be seeded by a WebRTC-capable client, i.e. webtorrent-hybrid (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid) or https://instant.io https://instant.io. We plan to build a desktop client (soon!) that can connect to normal BitTorrent peers, as well as WebRTC peers. These long-running peers will ensure there's lots of content available in the network that the shorter-running web peers can access. This is the vision: All torrent clients (desktop, web, mobile) talking directly to each other. If you're interested in learning more about the idea of "WebRTC everywhere", here are some links: https://github.com/webrtcftw/goals/issues/1 https://github.com/webrtcftw/goals/issues/1 https://github.com/jbenet/random-ideas/issues/13 https://github.com/jbenet/random-ideas/issues/13
- amelius 11y agoI guess the main problem is that browsers are not allowed to connect to random IP addresses using anything other than standard protocols. Otherwise, every website could potentially turn itself into a botnet. This problem is not likely to go away very easily, I suppose.
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- SchizoDuckie 11y ago> Coinado is a remote torrenting service. We do the torrenting for you, worry about seeding, keep your privacy and deliver the file over an encrypted connection. Requesting a file is simple. You just append the info hash of the torrent to the Coinado domain and when you start the download, the torrenting happens transparently on our servers and a minute later the file starts streaming to you. That sounds like a solid idea all around. I though this was the javascript torrent client implementation, instead, it relies on yet another service that can be taken down.
- chrisacree 11y agoWill be very interesting to see how this develops. They can't be hit with DMCA takedowns since they don't actually host any content, and unlike torrent sites they don't even index it themselves, so there's literally nothing for regulators to take down. They just turn torrents into HTTP downloads. All the same, I can't see the media companies letting something like this grow to a reasonable size. It'll be interesting to see what the attack is when it comes.
- Aissen 11y agoAnd it's nothing new. put.io has existed for years.
- slang800 11y agoAww, that's a shame. I was really hoping that this was a clever use of websockets like http://webtorrent.io http://webtorrent.io is.
- nacs 11y ago> I was really hoping that this was a clever use of websockets like http://webtorrent.io http://webtorrent.io is WebRTC not websockets.
- N0RMAN 11y agoSource: https://github.com/vmanin/popcorninyourbrowser https://github.com/vmanin/popcorninyourbrowser
- yAnonymous 11y agoThey should probably use SSL by default, but other than that it's an amazing idea and implementation, legal issues aside.
- throwaway_97 11y agoI found that at least in qBittorrent you can download media in sequence and consume it as it downloads. VlC seems to work fine even though it will prompt you about building a index first.
- tmikaeld 11y agoRequests currently giving 502 bad gateway.
- senorito 11y agoWhat is the big deal about this at all? Seriously, I don't get it. All I can see is that I can choose from some movies and stream them. But that's neither innovative nor new ...
- koolkat 11y agoI think that it has something to do with distribution. Most of the business was about distribution. Before it was dificult to distribute the information (music, movies etc) so you needed to hire someone to distribute your product and you paid a company which had the infrastructure to do so. This middle man soon became a cartel controlling distribution. Now distribution is easy and abundant so obviously it changes everything. They were selling a solution for something that used to be dificult that now is easy. Its like if your business was selling water in the desert and one day someone finds easy acces abundant water. Lets remember that most of the money is going to distributors not creators.
- wengzilla 11y agois this traceable to an individual computer? for instance, if i am using this on a college campus that traditionally bans the use of torrents, am i likely to get caught?
- fysac 11y agoWhile it may be traceable, I don't think you'll get in trouble because Coinado is the service doing the actual torrenting.
- path411 11y agoI don't think the college would be able to detect it as normal torrent traffic, but it would be pretty trivial to catch you using this specific site/service once your campus hears about it.
- WorldWideWayne 11y agoIs this better than Kodi + Genesis?
- shmerl 11y agoThat's how one should make a video service. Simple, user friendly and DRM-free. Until the backwards thinking film industry will learn this, they'll remain in the dark ages.
- Schwolop 11y agoI want an amnesty on piracy, paid for by an increase in my taxes, then used to fund government grants and financial support for content creators. Content should default to free and accessible, with few exceptions. Content creators should be able to earn a living. Those two statements are not mutually exclusive, but the current status quo makes them so.
- joeyespo 11y agoEssentially, a basic income? That would also create content creators. That is, allow people who would not normally create content from lack of time or security to begin doing so. It would also eliminate the waste caused from having a big department to determine who exactly "content creators" are.
- Schwolop 11y agoYep, that'd do it. :-)
- milankragujevic 11y agoif anybody's looking for a working alternative now that the original site is dead, check this out: http://betterpopcorn.imilan.me/ http://betterpopcorn.imilan.me/