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My biggest gripe with Popcorn Time is that it doesn't run on my TV. I use a cloud server instead and Radarr/Sonarr combined with Real-Debrid(to download torrents) and Usenet to download content. I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes.
This allows me to run Plex/Jellyfin on my TV and stream. Bonus points is that it even works on my mobile phone when I'm on the move!
> I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes
You do not have all movies >6 with a bunch of votes on just 16TB, unless the cutoff is like 100k+ votes and you're downloading 1080p max. I have a 73TB server at 99% capacity right now and I hardly have a movie library.
Instead of telling someone they're wrong you could just assume they mean 1080p. If we're talking 1080p encodes you can totally do it in that size. If you're using 73TB for barely a collection you're just wasting space.
1080p is the way to go IMO
Yep, most of the movies are 1080p h265. I run ffmpeg scripts to auto convert h264 to hevc and generate smaller files.
I do have 4K rips for movies I like and new movies, but by default download 1080p hevc only. I stay away from remuxes
That's kind of what I'm thinking, after getting my 4k HDR TV I was blown away by the filesizes needed to make full use of it.
Just the most popular stuff and limited to 1080p or less though... Yeah 16Tb is pushing it.
I use https://github.com/hauxir/rapidbay for this purpose.
the advantage of that is that it's all on-demand. no need to set up sonarr/radarr. Just set up a bunch of trackers to search from and pick from them on demand.
Radar and Sonarr here with Overseerr as an UI for my wife. Bazarr for subs, jackett as a client for torrent sites, unpackerr for unpacking zips. Good old Transmission as download client.
Why do you need a special program to unpack rars? I just use qbittorrent and put this command in the "run external program on torrent finished" box: 7z x "%F/*.rar" -o"%F/"
It's a shame unpackerr is needed. BitTorrent works better on large uncompressed files.
And how many of these movies have you actually watched? This just sounds like a text book case of digital hoarding. Most people I know that torrent do it on a distinct interest in watching vs might possibly some day maybe want to watch it so let's just get it ahead of time.
I'm not judging, just noting that it's a definite new "use case" to me
It’s quite amazing how much you can do with a working self-hosted setup and a decent amount of storage. The open source community around self-hosted services is stronger than ever.
A few of my favorite lesser known self-hosted projects are Audiobookshelf, Komga (comic/manga reader), and Kavita (ebook/comic/manga reader).
I have a similar setup (32TB NAS + Jellyfin). I use three different Radarr instances (1080p/4k/Anime). Every movie that I've liked on LetterBoxd gets downloaded automatically in 1080p / 4k (1080p for streaming outside my home). Jellyseer allows me to give access to friends and they're able to request stuff easily that's not on streaming. I also use Infuse on AppleTV which has support for Dolby Atmos / Dolby Vision. Absolutely amazing once you get it setup, I've been slowly rebuilding my blu-ray collection digitally too.
Stremio with Torrentio plugin functions exactly the same as Popcorn Time and runs on TVs
> I have a 16TB server on which I have downloaded all movies with IMDB rating > 6 and a good number of votes.
That seems like a lot of movies. How many of those 16TB are used by all movies with IMBD rating > 6 ?
you use real-debrid and plex and not plex-debrid? https://github.com/itsToggle/plex_debrid
Downloading movies is for the stone age!.
Plex shares are harder to find now but on Discord you can find servers with 100s of TB of movies and TV show to stream straight from your devices with no work and just a small monthly payment
Really interesting mix of npm packages, gulpfiles, jshint, both underscore and lodash, backbone.js, some stuff i've never really heard of like nedb which is probably because its more specific to electron. It actually uses node-webkit NW.js instead of electron.
It's an interesting mix of new and old things as a project that likely has changed hands many times. Like dayjs is pretty new.
It's also some real shady shit, requiring MacOS users use an unsigned installer package.
There's no reason it should require an installer package when it can be distributed as a self-contained app.
I'm not giving authorization to an unsigned installer file made by some anonymous Russians.
The homogeneity of a JavaScript codebase has a tenth the half-life of an "enterprise" lang/framework.
IMO this is because the JavaScript ecosystem is speedrunning the decades of lessons learned by the greater software engineering field.
cloc Popcorn-Time.app/
16195 text files.
11358 unique files.
5044 files ignored.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JavaScript 6015 106427 177209 638087
JSON 947 36 0 214754
Markdown 964 42676 224 101002
YAML 9 19 20 97485
CSS 46 6016 985 88269
SVG 2557 0 17 43048
TypeScript 581 2481 78577 37547
Popcorn Time is back?
I guess it “returned” a couple years ago, as discussed heavily here:
The code never went anywhere.
Mixed feelings about this. I do not wish for it to be shut down again, but I hope people realize that every popcorn time user is one less qbitorrent user that accidentally leaves their client open in the background.
I have a theory that most seeding is done by people who are unaware they are doing it or don't even know what it is. Tech like webtorrents, clients for portable devices and this are harmful to the network in the long term.
Unless they bring new users that would not normally use torrent and that happen to participate while they watch their movie?
The only question left to ask is… anyone want to give me view access to their movie tv server?
Strem.io + plugins + real-debrid.com
beats the old and the new popcorn time
I use stremio with some torrent plugin. I've read about debrid , but don't really get it's advantage. Is it mainly to avoid being identified as torrenting by authorities? So if i live in a torrent friendly country it doesn't matter?
Additionally you can use Infuse if you are in Apple ecosystem and use their AppleTV app to watch everything on your TV! Just setup Infuse with Real Debrid as WebDAV and you're set, you can even get the subtitles downloaded!
Amen. Keep spreading the gospel. This is what we all imagined the world of online streaming would actually be like.
Works great! Any idea if it is possible to cast the video to my chromecast?
Nice, project resurrected?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Wow, the Windows version has a lot of files... 18,450.
(https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop/releases...).
Just yesterday I was thinking about Popcorn Time and now I see it here.
Can you think of my bank account having 30m$? tnx
Popcorn Time app takes ages to load even on my 5600X. It is one of those apps which I think should definitely move to Bun
IMO just join a private group and use Plex.
You'll never have any ISP woes/issues.
As long as private trackers have absurd seeding rules and require you to sign up (initially) without your VPN active, I won't be touching them with a ten foot socket.
Plex saved me from my Samsung TV's abysmal UPnP client.
Use Jellyfin over Plex, it is open source for one thing and it's not being enshittified as Plex is, as Plex tries to generate revenue from notoriously cheap customers, by definition.
How?