Think of Popcorn Time like Netflix, just with movies worth watching. Find a title and click “Watch It Now”. That’s it.
The media catalog is impressive. Everything from first run movies to classics like Hook are available to watch. Frozen, American Hustle, Gravity — even Delivery Man if your a touch masochistic. Captain Philips, Dallas Buyers Club, and the Bridge on the River Kwai are there. All the videos are free. And slightly illegal.
Popcorn Time works by streaming torrents. These are the same files available to download on sites like The Pirate Bay and others. But instead of using a Torrent downloader like Utorrent and then forcing the user to playback the file in a media player, Popcorn Time does all of that in the background. Like any good technology, it’s like magic to the user.
The program is currently in beta and available for Linux, OS X 10.7, and Windows 7 and above. It installs like any other program and doesn’t require any special network configuration. Popcorn Time very well could signal the rebirth of the HTPC the way Boxee did years ago. Since the program is open source, hopefully it will make its way onto the Apple TV and other set top boxes.
Popcorn Time is not perfect, but it’s damn close. Video playback is occasionally jittery and the files do not seem to support advance audio codecs. It takes about 10-15 seconds to start streaming the video — sometimes a bit longer. Plus there’s the whole thing about piracy.
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