> 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.
Don't use propaganda terms like 'compensation' here. It's not compensation unless you hired someone to do something. The reason the media corporations want you to use terms that don't make rational sense is because it gets you to think, wrongly, that you owe them money all the time and forever. Don't fall for it my friend. No one thinks there's anything wrong with supporting creativity and artistry so let's stop using their bullshit terms together.
That could be a valid idea for a startup, where movie people can sign up to sell 'virtual tickets' that provide users with the legal right to watch a movie no matter where they got it from. It could even be transferrable, identifiable tickets (... ahem, cryptocurrency, ahem).
Most copyright disclaimers allow that already ("without the expressed written consent of the copyright owner" etc).
It blows my mind that it's 2014 and we can't do this. We are locked behind garbage cable boxes, poorly built custom software, and region locking, all of which is from a different era.
Pay for what, the ability to stream a movie? Don't we already have a dozen options for that?
I don't think this interesting as a feature, it's the backend technology that's interesting. On a related note, Spotify does something similar to get music to listeners by having existing users upload to new listeners.
When I visit the cinema, it's usually for the experience, and less to do with catching a new release. For example, I wanted to go see Gravity this week. I could torrent the movie, but I heard good things about Gravity in theaters. Nonetheless, all the theaters within an hour drive stopped playing it, so I'm out of luck.
They should allow people to buy and stream new releases online. Then, I think they should use theaters for a mix of new movies, and old movies. Run themes, have 80s week, or classic horror movie week, or Star Wars week, or Hitchcock week.
I don't feel any bad for not paying those movies. These guys aren't exactly in need.
That said, yes, if the same service was proposed at a decent price and with recent releases (even popcorn doesn't get the freshest stuff), i'd totally just pay for it too.
Netflix, prime, etc don't even have stuff that's as recent or of similar quality.. (yes they've some of them)
It is the middleman problem. It is not yours. Movies will never disappear. You think all studios will close, no, they will just evolve or die. There are thousand examples of dead labor, technologies that passed away without much drama, just because consumers wanted a different thing or changed their consuming habits.
Why does it always need to be about the money?? Imagine giving a candy to a child. You make the child happy, and that is your reward. Or do you expect the child to say something like "let me pay you"?...
You're far more likely to be caught by directly looking at torrent peers as is already done in bulk by media companies and is far better proof of piracy than a Google Analytics hit. Use a VPN if you're using this and have any questions about the legality of it in your area. Typically VPN providers only get complaints sent to datacenters, not actual lawsuits.
> It shouldn't be my responsibility to try to get these movies legally
Ignoring that statement, which is a nice way to excuse your obvious criminal act(s), despite the correctness of the situation, paying these fees is fine when it's only a few, but the key is that we need centralized services to offer everything easily. If every content creator starts to have their own distribution method, get ready to complain about the "expensive" $10-15 fees you pay for 15 different services!
I'm waiting for the day when consolidation hits and we have 3-5 major streaming players that have almost everything available. Netflix's movie selection is just depressing...
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
In Netherland, we pay a "home copy" fee on harddisks and smartphones, which makes it entirely legal and ethical to download movies.
Only downside: uploading movies without permission from the copyright holder is still illegal, and bittorrent uploads while it downloads, so this may still be illegal.
They seem to be leaving the ethical considerations to the users, which I think is perfectly reasonable. Popcorn Time can't decide for you whether it's okay to stream a movie that you own the VHS for. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie published by a company that distorts copyright law for its own financial gain.
They only created a tool. Tools can be used for many purposes. I can smash someone in the skull with a hammer or I can use it for construction. Similarly, should the Tor, PGP, Bitcoin, etc authors consider that their tools could be used for malice and stop because of it? Tools are tools, they are simply implementations of what is possible with technology. Tools are inherently grey, not some simple black and white. It's about what you do with them.
I, for one, do not believe in intellectual property. Information not being rare commodity, it makes no sense to artificially limit it's supply by issuing state enforced monopolies. That actually infringes on actual property such as a hard disk, by limiting the number of combinations of bits that you're allowed to store on it.
Doesn't it pretend? The screenshoot shows very old movies. My initial impression from the web site was that this application provided a nice interface to some repository of freely redistributable movies.
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.
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.
This is a real issue indeed. First of all, in XBMCtorrent, I'm using libtorrent-rasterbar, which is _very_ optimized for the swarm.
Second, seeding in enforced during playback, to "give back".
Third, there is a time randomization in which hot spots (pieces who are big demand) are also the ones who are the most shared (since everybody is seeding these).
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.
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.
Or maybe it will push content providers to make movies and shows available for streaming from day one. So far piracy has only done good things for consumers, in the sense that it has forced Big Content to do what consumers wanted all along, ever since Napster came out.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
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"
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.
This community is about making widely used product, and pushing boundaries; ease of use and torrenting are absolutely part of that. Say: it is acceptable that the software torrents out without the user’s knowledge? How are the files architectured to allow fast start? Is there a way to improve the experience by preloading some? How is this coming to affect how Netflix positions itself?
Can this mean that content can be disintermediated a little more, and could something, say a documentary that wouldn’t fit on YouTube (say, because it includes violence, or suspected espionnage) and wouldn’t be able to be produced by common producers would still be able to reach an audience and critical success? There has been many attempts at making torrents more user-friendly, and this is an interesting example.
I think the point is that what was formerly a file-oriented task now behaves much more like a service. Netflix would be nowhere near as popular if you had to download the movie file before watching.
Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.
The subtitles feature is a huge win for me. My partner is Spanish speaking so every film we watch requires a hunt through various subtitles sites(not being able to use srt files with likes the of iTunes is also a major issue when paying for films). Of course I know how to do it but it's one of those things that has really made we wish there was a good quality commercial offering(I'd be very happy to pay something like $70/month for a spotify type service).
Once you involve the filesystem, you lose about 90% of users. Personally, I think hierarchical file systems a pain in the ass. I'm glad platforms are moving away from them.
I disagree completely. It's not about solving a the problem of not being able to "download a torrent file", but adding a new functionality to an established protocol.
I find the idea very interesting, conceptually and technically.
Then just don't read/upvote/post in this thread, the community already has the necessary tools (upvote and downvote) to decide whether it is the place here for this type of threads or not.
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.
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!
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.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
cheez|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
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.
jacobbudin|12 years ago
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ICSVLPA/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/12-years-a-slave/id7403669...
And many others: http://www.foxdigitalhd.com/12-years-a-slave
Sony could not have made it any easier to get this film into your living room.
(Regardless, I don't think media companies have an obligation to make their content available to anyone, anywhere.)
ElDiablo666|12 years ago
return0|12 years ago
Most copyright disclaimers allow that already ("without the expressed written consent of the copyright owner" etc).
Has anyone ever implemented this?
mrcharles|12 years ago
slashdotaccount|12 years ago
B-Con|12 years ago
Pay for what, the ability to stream a movie? Don't we already have a dozen options for that?
I don't think this interesting as a feature, it's the backend technology that's interesting. On a related note, Spotify does something similar to get music to listeners by having existing users upload to new listeners.
mwally|12 years ago
Paying these animals only encourages their deviant behavior. If you value a free and open Internet, you will starve Hollywood until it dies.
Hollywood only continues to exist because people like you keep feeding them. Don't feed the animals.
User8712|12 years ago
They should allow people to buy and stream new releases online. Then, I think they should use theaters for a mix of new movies, and old movies. Run themes, have 80s week, or classic horror movie week, or Star Wars week, or Hitchcock week.
zobzu|12 years ago
That said, yes, if the same service was proposed at a decent price and with recent releases (even popcorn doesn't get the freshest stuff), i'd totally just pay for it too.
Netflix, prime, etc don't even have stuff that's as recent or of similar quality.. (yes they've some of them)
meerita|12 years ago
mFixman|12 years ago
RealGeek|12 years ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuOaTwuzlrY
rytis|12 years ago
humanfromearth|12 years ago
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/
ultramancool|12 years ago
MatthewPhillips|12 years ago
galapago|12 years ago
jordsmi|12 years ago
pantalaimon|12 years ago
cincinnatus|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
chucknelson|12 years ago
Ignoring that statement, which is a nice way to excuse your obvious criminal act(s), despite the correctness of the situation, paying these fees is fine when it's only a few, but the key is that we need centralized services to offer everything easily. If every content creator starts to have their own distribution method, get ready to complain about the "expensive" $10-15 fees you pay for 15 different services!
I'm waiting for the day when consolidation hits and we have 3-5 major streaming players that have almost everything available. Netflix's movie selection is just depressing...
snippyhollow|12 years ago
It's free software https://github.com/steeve/xbmctorrent and uses libtorrent-rasterbar through https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent-go
steeve|12 years ago
Disclosure: I'm the author.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379166
laacz|12 years ago
jcutrell|12 years ago
manojlds|12 years ago
mikehearn|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
That said, I think the cable companies would just jack the rates on internet service to compensate for their dwindling cable usage.
d23|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
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.
mcv|12 years ago
Only downside: uploading movies without permission from the copyright holder is still illegal, and bittorrent uploads while it downloads, so this may still be illegal.
solipsism|12 years ago
ultramancool|12 years ago
dabrowski|12 years ago
abrahamsen|12 years ago
pdpi|12 years ago
kzrdude|12 years ago
gabriel34|12 years ago
wpietri|12 years ago
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.
epaladin|12 years ago
steeve|12 years ago
Second, seeding in enforced during playback, to "give back".
Third, there is a time randomization in which hot spots (pieces who are big demand) are also the ones who are the most shared (since everybody is seeding these).
hrjet|12 years ago
moheeb|12 years ago
t3ra|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
I hope they add TV shows with a nice interface for browsing seasons.
bstrand|12 years ago
The cognitive dissonance, it burns.
steeve|12 years ago
hershel|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
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.
slashdotaccount|12 years ago
higherpurpose|12 years ago
alexose|12 years ago
While the frontend is all Backbone, the real magic happens in its backend dependencies like peerflix (https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix) and 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 !
Double Edit: The API appears to be developed by the Popcorn Time people, as per https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/issues/294
fenghorn|12 years ago
_tb|12 years ago
sergiotapia|12 years ago
ihuman|12 years ago
dpweb|12 years ago
cmiles74|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
quasque|12 years ago
wernercd|12 years ago
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?
quadrangle|12 years ago
slashdotaccount|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
prot|12 years ago
coretx|12 years ago
robogrowth|12 years ago
kekumu|12 years ago
viiralvx|12 years ago
BerislavLopac|12 years ago
qasimvirjee|12 years ago
middleclick|12 years ago
nikolak|12 years ago
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
misener|12 years ago
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/popcorn-time-is-like-netfl...
vrikis|12 years ago
shmerl|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
xymostech|12 years ago
anjc|12 years ago
meowface|12 years ago
frozenport|12 years ago
shykes|12 years ago
clienthunter|12 years ago
watty|12 years ago
quadrangle|12 years ago
That would be the MPAA actively encouraging infringement in order to then attack the infringers.
csmattryder|12 years ago
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
henryaj|12 years ago
zanny|12 years ago
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.
captainmuon|12 years ago
Doublon|12 years ago
alg0rith|12 years ago
Why bother.
Ziron|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
dansku|12 years ago
lewaldman|12 years ago
This is AMAZING news!!!
jokoon|12 years ago
I don't think the app really is useful when you weighs the risks.
bicx|12 years ago
userbinator|12 years ago
rickyc091|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
1stop|12 years ago
3327|12 years ago
sergiotapia|12 years ago
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/
bertil|12 years ago
Can this mean that content can be disintermediated a little more, and could something, say a documentary that wouldn’t fit on YouTube (say, because it includes violence, or suspected espionnage) and wouldn’t be able to be produced by common producers would still be able to reach an audience and critical success? There has been many attempts at making torrents more user-friendly, and this is an interesting example.
jmclean|12 years ago
Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.
ollysb|12 years ago
rayiner|12 years ago
Kurtz79|12 years ago
I find the idea very interesting, conceptually and technically.
slashdotaccount|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
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xpop2027|12 years ago
caioariede|12 years ago
whitef0x|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
jypepin|12 years ago
abustamam|12 years ago
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|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
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wdewind|12 years ago
maxholnaicher|12 years ago
kphild|12 years ago
bolonomicz|12 years ago
wathars|12 years ago
abustamam|12 years ago
I mean, both Apple and Microsoft are filthy rich, so what's a few thousand?
tomc1985|12 years ago
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dpanah|12 years ago
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