It's a gray area in lots of countries, although typically they tend to have much greater issues than some very low income worker trying to find escape in torrenting films.
Well, the downloading is legal in Netherland (we already pay a fee for that). The uploading not so much. Not sure if it matters that you only upload what you downloaded, so you aren't distributing anything that wasn't already distributed.
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.
Why couldn't you maintain a local cache with JavaScript? Chrome and Opera already support the Filesystem API and it's only a matter of time before it ceases to be a working draft. But even discounting that API (which allows you to set a user authorized storage limit your application has read/write access to) there are already ways to cache > 5 MB of data in the browser; they're just hacks at this point.
If the FS API were standardized and broadly adopted then yeah, it wouldn't be an issue. I've never gone around trying to store greater than localstorage on all the browsers though to know if it would work.
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.
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.
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.
This is what (sadly) puts a hole in the concept. Because most of the tyrant ISPs don't provide symmetric connections, you are never going to maintain a 1.0 ratio throughout a viewing, so you depend on seed boxes to keep the download demands from crippling popular videos. Unless they add a daemon option to keep seeding when not using the app, users are always leechers.
Not necessarily. It doesn't matter how much faster your download speed is as long as your upload speed is fast enough to "reverse stream". i.e. for a 700mb 1h40 movie your upload speed needs to be ~120kB/s, which most people have now (at least in the UK)
That is only if you always watch your movie start to finish. If you don't consume the whole film that number goes up dramatically, say if you watched 5 minutes at a 5MB/1MB connection, then you could download 1.5GB (probably half the movie) while only seeding 300MB back.
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"
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.
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.
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.
Your use of capitalization is completely unnecessary. I think a better convention might be to use single stars like completely or double stars like completely but the moment I see letters in all caps I just automatically disregard whatever it is that person is saying.
Edit: HN doesn't seem to know what to do with double stars.
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.
If I understand you correctly that you don't care for the paradigm of organizing your data in a hierarchical database I would be curious to know what you would use preferably, say when you want to open a document? Tags? Full content search?
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).
VLC player has a plugin that can do this for you. It's called Vlsub. It doesn't check for synchronization, but you can try out about 3-4 subtitles in less than a minute, so it works very well in practice.
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.
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".
RASPMC and a Raspberry Pi. Takes like 3 seconds to get setup and is easier to get going than a DVR. My parents have no issues using XBMC on my Raspberry Pi that I left back home.
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.
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.
Binary blobs running on user boxes can collect direct, identifiable, evidence. Spying an IP address from afar that may or may not be proxied/NAT'd is flimsy circumstantial evidence at best.
> 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."
And youtube has a sophisticated detection system setup that scans uploads for copyrighted content automatically. I'm thinking with the press this app is getting they are going to be forced to do something similar and block illegal content, or take it offline soon.
There is a lot of free software out there that its primary goal is to facilitate copyright infringement, I guess it is just up to the court or whomever to decide if that is the case, and worth pursuing taking it down. (Not saying that the effort could be put in for this case, but just a possibility)...
YouTube with its reporting system has created a de facto situation where rightsholder giants like record companies, their copyrights matter, while the copyrights of the random creator (The Long Tail!) are never enforced.
Maybe you are a long tail creator and you police youtube. But most won't. Maybe they can't. Maybe they are dead.
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.
>>Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore.
That would be a great idea. However, the Popcorn Time website states that they only use torrents from YIFY. A brief perusal of the YIFY website tells me that they only have recent or big blockbuster films. I tried searching for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Intolerance", and neither showed up. As far as the status of the service goes right now, its main purpose is to stream pirated movies. This could change in the future as Popcorn Time opens up to accept more sources.
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.
It doesn't matter how legal your tools are if what you're doing is illegal. And this particular tool is pre-populated with copyrighted content. They don't show it in the screen captures (why? </sarcasm>), but all the films in the popular tab are 2013-2014 major U.S. theatrical releases.
Very true, I hope the devs published this somewhat anonymously at least. It's essentially just YIFY torrents taped to the peerflix script with some node-webkit glue.
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.
Capital-I Industry, perhaps. But I argue that it's because it's a lot harder to sell garbage albums with just one or two hit songs when you can go to Bandcamp and find a better artist, preview a whole album, and buy it for $5.
What did professional music look like before radio? Before audio recording? I'm not convinced that business models that emerged due to technological change should be protected from future technology.
Yes but you could also argue that there are many many many more artists making money in the music industry now, and that consumers have much more choice.
Sure they're not all making millions, but I'd rather see an industry with more players each making less money (i.e. more choices for me), than a smaller group of pre-selected artists (and the machinery behind them) that take home tons of money but put out less varied produced-by-committee content designed for mass consumption.
So I think it's arguable whether it's better or worse for the industry, but it's definitely better for the consumer.
That's like if the parent post said, "The invention of the web allowed many more people to communicate, and was an economic boon" and you replied, "Microsoft would disagree."
Just because the old toll collectors, middlemen, and gatekeepers are worse off doesn't mean that's true for society as a whole.
If plenty of music is being made, so what? If certain businesses cannot make so much money, tough luck on them -- they should get out of business. That is the market.
The purpose of copyright law is to ensure good amounts of production for the public overall. It is not there to help certain rent-seeking companies make money.
While there is a lot of piracy, it's relatively small compared to the overall entertainment market. It's still been generally limited to the tech savvy crowd. Setting up bittorrent or usenet is just too hard for the average person. They could learn it, but they are unwilling to even try to.
An app like this? Which is just download and it works? That is a huge threat. My grandma could use this.
So while a small amount of piracy isn't harmful, everyone being able to pirate everything with total ease, is harmful.
The copyright industry has been 'crying wolf' for ages. No-one should listen.
We do not even know that very large amounts of piracy would be bad -- the market would probably reconfigure and adapt.
We should increase people's ease at getting and using informational goods (by reducing artificial restrictions) and see what happens -- yes, observe the actual evidence.
>we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!
That just means despite losing "potential income" the industry is still managing to earn money via people who do not wish to circumvent Copyright Law. Or in other words, the number of people not interested in infringing copyright is greater than the number of pirates. That doesn't mean anything other than a majority of people respect copyright law.
>So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically
Please link to data that demonstrates piracy is economically beneficial to everyone. Since you're claiming 'almost certainly' - I assume you can find hundreds of studies.
Here is my simple thought experiment. Let us say it was impossible to pirate Windows or popular games or tv shows and people had to pay the $100 or w/e it is. Would every single pirate switch to Linux, free games, non-copyrighted entertainment OR Will some of them end up paying the $100?
If reducing Windows piracy means more Linux adoption, I wonder if the Linux cheerleaders would be onboard to reduce Windows piracy :)
As Landes and Posner say in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law' (Conclusion, p422, s3) (2003):
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."
And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.
Now, the main purpose of copyright is to get the best trade-off in production level and access to goods. So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?
> losing 'potential income'
What does that even mean? Really, what? If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!
The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)
>And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.
Seriously? You use the words "almost certainly" and are now trying to weasel out when simply asked to back up your statement? The correct response when you don't have data is to say - I don't know at the moment.
>So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?
Lack of evidence is just proof of lack of evidence. You don't get to make any wild assertions because they sound reasonable in your head. And even if you do, you have to qualify them with the appropriate words - you don't get to say "almost certainly".
>What does that even mean? Really, what?
Perform my thought experiment.
> If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!
Thats a rather childish way of twisting my argument. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand and does not deserve a response.
>The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)
If you don't like the law, get it changed. What have you done in that regard?
--
There is a solution for your problem that doesn't involve breaking laws just because you don't like them.
1) Support artists who put out their work in non-copyrighted form. Perhaps they could have a new model like kickstarter for music/movies/games with people pledging money.
2) Help reduce piracy of copyrighted material and get people to support above artists.
3) The vastly increased sales of those artists will attract even more artists to that model creating a nice feedback loop.
4) Copyrighted forms of entertainment will diminish in their importance and the MPAA/RIAA could perhaps cease to exist.
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.
We have the same 'private copy' tax in France. It is a tax on ALL storages (proportional to the size) to take a fee in the case you would use the storage for copyrighted stuff.
While it does not make download legal, in my opinion it makes it ethical. I paid a tax on it, I might as well use it.
That's not the only downside. The other is there's a tax on storage hardware even if you never do anything with copyrighted anything. And all the tax ends up going to wealthy corporations anyway and smaller artists will never see anything.
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.
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.
Convince your customers to use self-hosted analytics software instead. Of course you understand the danger of a single entity (google-analytics.com) tracking almost every website you visit.
Piwik with Nginx was easy enough to set up and provides the data I am interested in, including conversions of goals (something I was dubious about before installing). New version even more snazzy than previous.
Confirmed with WireShark. This app is a GUI around YIFY.
The binary you download from Mega.co.nz uses "YIFY Torrents" website yts.re exclusively. Github code seems to be actually used. So it all runs via this single webserver (+Google analytics). Just to verify what a installed binary blob does on your Linux box. The ease of use is impressive, a new level for P2P-ish work since Napster/Kazaa/Limewire days.
Quickly skimming the file no longer counts as "running without thinking" but even then, if the server sent a different file to browsers than it does to curl...
Obviously. But then it's incredibly dangerous to run any command posted online without thinking; at least this one is easy to understand and verify.
Given the demographic of this site, I thought I'd be insulting everyone's intelligence by offering up a more verbose description. I mean the description is the command itself! And verifying the contents of the URL is as simple as viewing a web page (if anyone can't manage that then I wonder how they're reading that command to begin with :p).
With `curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts`, you know that the damage is contained to appending malicious data to /etc/hosts. Furthermore, the use of tee guarentees that you see the data that gets appended. Additionally the potential damage of malicious data in /etc/hosts is minimal if quickly detected and fixed.
FYI, the google analytics lines are commented out in that source, as it "breaks some sites". So your command doesn't help in this case until you uncomment those lines.
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.
looking at torrent peers ... and is far better proof of piracy
It's not proof of piracy. It just proves that some bytes were downloaded. What, for example, if you could prove that you paid for the movie you're downloading? Lets say you buy a movie using the Video app on the Xbox, but want to watch it on your old Windows XP desktop, or on your Android phone?
I simply meant to compare with Google Analytics hits, not to say anything is absolute proof, but being on a tracker or DHT is certainly a better indication than GA would be.
Though if you personally join the peer queue and serve over 30s of a movie to them, you've just proved that someone using that IP is pirating that movie. Even if you own the movie elsewhere, if I recall correctly many jurisdictions do not protect the personal transfer you're talking about. The laws are quite stupid here, but that's just how it is.
if you could prove that you paid for the movie you're downloading? Lets say you buy a movie using the Video app on the Xbox, but want to watch it on your old Windows XP desktop, or on your Android phone?
I'd be very surprised to learn there's a legal way for you to do this considering the movie you download on your Xbox is going to be PlayReady DRM encumbered.
1. You're downloading. This may or may not be copyright infringement, even if you do already have other licence[s] for the media. Check the licences and the law, if you can understand either.
2. If you're seeding, you're allowing others to download from you. If you're not licensed to do this by the copyright holder [if any], you might be infringing in certain jurisdictions.
What I'm saying is that the new movies are not available in DVDs so there are no quality pirate releases (only unwatchable camera rips) unless there is a leaked copy of the movie (very rare).
I have no idea what kind of money companies get from DVDs, but if we where to go to a world where I would have to go to cinema to see every movie I'm interested in then I'd just stay home and watch horrible Cam rips. I have no desire to go to cinema and pay ridiculous amounts of money for movie tickets and whatever shit they are passing as food these days, I want to stay home and enjoy the movie not listen as some kids giggle next to me.
> Hollywood studios (should) make their money in cinemas
I'd be just as happy if all movies went straight to streaming, I'd even be ok with higher prices closer to the release if they did drop down to reasonable levels after a period of time. I personally have grown to hate going to the theater, I find it much more enjoyable to watch movies in the comfort of my home without people talking, babies crying, and teenage girls on their cell phones the whole time. Not to mention I refuse to pay for concessions which are extremely over priced.
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.
By making it actually readily available, instantly, in a usable interface, close enough to free as customer doesn't care the cost.
For decades, I've seen endless such "but it's free/easy/instant" things be anything but, insofar as it takes resources (time, fiddling, knowledge, skill, tools, etc) costing on par with paid versions, isn't easy for >90% of the population, and falls down often enough that it's hardly 'instant'.
$99 + $8/mo works a whole lot better than most any "free/easy/instant" solution I've seen. Sure, you may be one of the fringe consumers who can handle such solutions, but most people can't. There's always some part which is so dull/annoying/unsatisfying, but must be done right to achieve persistent widespread acceptance, that you'll have to pay (and recoup) someone to do.
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.
That's an interesting take on it. Even in a single entertainment category it can often feel like the supply far outstrips demand, especially if my morbidly obese Steam library is considered.
> 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.
That's only because the home video market allowed people the luxury to legally watch any existing movie anytime they want, once they have purchased it, without the possibility of the studio revoking permission.
Don't worry - studios are already trying to think of ways to "fix" that (stream-only content that is never released in DVD format is one example)
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.
No, I don't have a demonstration since nothing like this was ever widely adopted, but it is an opinion shared among the bittorrent community:
"One of the key algorithms in bittorrent is the rarest-first piece picker. It is vital to bittorrent’s performance that the piece picker fulfills both of these requirements:
The rarest piece is picked (from the client’s point of view of the swarm)
If two or more pieces have the same rarity, pick one of them at random
The reason to pick a random rarest piece is to always strive towards evening out the piece distribution in the swarm. Having an even piece distribution improves peers’ ability to trade pieces and improves the swarm’s tolerance to peers leaving."
http://blog.libtorrent.org/2011/11/writing-a-fast-piece-pick...
I think that analysis only holds for people who want the whole package and aren't in a hurry.
If you're shifting to a demand-driven system, then pieces aren't needed equally. A numerically even piece distribution isn't what the swarm most needs. Indeed, I start watching things on Netflix that I never finish, so having more people with early pieces of something would better mirror actual demand for them.
I'm sure that plenty of people in the Bittorrent community are worried about change, but plenty of people in every community are worried about change. Until I see some math or some simulations demonstrating that this can't work, I won't be persuaded that there's an actual problem beyond the (reasonable and legitimate) fear of change.
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).
384 comments
[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 1020 ms ] threadHowever, there has never been a verdict on this.
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
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.
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
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/popcorn-time-is-like-netfl...
Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.
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.
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/
Edit: HN doesn't seem to know what to do with double stars.
English speaker, but I have hearing issues.
I find the idea very interesting, conceptually and technically.
Why bother.
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".
It's free software https://github.com/steeve/xbmctorrent and uses libtorrent-rasterbar through https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent-go
Disclosure: I'm the author.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379166
I know the pi was created to be an educational tool, not a media device, but therein lies the problem.
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.
That would be the MPAA actively encouraging infringement in order to then attack the infringers.
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."
YouTube with its reporting system has created a de facto situation where rightsholder giants like record companies, their copyrights matter, while the copyrights of the random creator (The Long Tail!) are never enforced.
Maybe you are a long tail creator and you police youtube. But most won't. Maybe they can't. Maybe they are dead.
That would be a great idea. However, the Popcorn Time website states that they only use torrents from YIFY. A brief perusal of the YIFY website tells me that they only have recent or big blockbuster films. I tried searching for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Intolerance", and neither showed up. As far as the status of the service goes right now, its main purpose is to stream pirated movies. This could change in the future as Popcorn Time opens up to accept more sources.
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.
Sure they're not all making millions, but I'd rather see an industry with more players each making less money (i.e. more choices for me), than a smaller group of pre-selected artists (and the machinery behind them) that take home tons of money but put out less varied produced-by-committee content designed for mass consumption.
So I think it's arguable whether it's better or worse for the industry, but it's definitely better for the consumer.
Just because the old toll collectors, middlemen, and gatekeepers are worse off doesn't mean that's true for society as a whole.
The purpose of copyright law is to ensure good amounts of production for the public overall. It is not there to help certain rent-seeking companies make money.
An app like this? Which is just download and it works? That is a huge threat. My grandma could use this.
So while a small amount of piracy isn't harmful, everyone being able to pirate everything with total ease, is harmful.
We do not even know that very large amounts of piracy would be bad -- the market would probably reconfigure and adapt.
We should increase people's ease at getting and using informational goods (by reducing artificial restrictions) and see what happens -- yes, observe the actual evidence.
That just means despite losing "potential income" the industry is still managing to earn money via people who do not wish to circumvent Copyright Law. Or in other words, the number of people not interested in infringing copyright is greater than the number of pirates. That doesn't mean anything other than a majority of people respect copyright law.
>So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically
Please link to data that demonstrates piracy is economically beneficial to everyone. Since you're claiming 'almost certainly' - I assume you can find hundreds of studies.
Here is my simple thought experiment. Let us say it was impossible to pirate Windows or popular games or tv shows and people had to pay the $100 or w/e it is. Would every single pirate switch to Linux, free games, non-copyrighted entertainment OR Will some of them end up paying the $100?
If reducing Windows piracy means more Linux adoption, I wonder if the Linux cheerleaders would be onboard to reduce Windows piracy :)
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."
And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.
Now, the main purpose of copyright is to get the best trade-off in production level and access to goods. So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?
> losing 'potential income'
What does that even mean? Really, what? If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!
The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)
Seriously? You use the words "almost certainly" and are now trying to weasel out when simply asked to back up your statement? The correct response when you don't have data is to say - I don't know at the moment.
>So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?
Lack of evidence is just proof of lack of evidence. You don't get to make any wild assertions because they sound reasonable in your head. And even if you do, you have to qualify them with the appropriate words - you don't get to say "almost certainly".
>What does that even mean? Really, what?
Perform my thought experiment.
> If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!
Thats a rather childish way of twisting my argument. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand and does not deserve a response.
>The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)
If you don't like the law, get it changed. What have you done in that regard?
--
There is a solution for your problem that doesn't involve breaking laws just because you don't like them.
1) Support artists who put out their work in non-copyrighted form. Perhaps they could have a new model like kickstarter for music/movies/games with people pledging money.
2) Help reduce piracy of copyrighted material and get people to support above artists.
3) The vastly increased sales of those artists will attract even more artists to that model creating a nice feedback loop.
4) Copyrighted forms of entertainment will diminish in their importance and the MPAA/RIAA could perhaps cease to exist.
You would need an alternate universe with no torrenting to server as a control for your statement.
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.
"Les flux financiers de la Rémunération pour Copie Privée": http://bit.ly/1fn0PqX
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/
Naturally this will also block you using google.
Its more of drastic stop tracking me measurement.
I block it with Ghostery.
Piwik with Nginx was easy enough to set up and provides the data I am interested in, including conversions of goals (something I was dubious about before installing). New version even more snazzy than previous.
I'm sure it's fine from a functional perspective.
The binary you download from Mega.co.nz uses "YIFY Torrents" website yts.re exclusively. Github code seems to be actually used. So it all runs via this single webserver (+Google analytics). Just to verify what a installed binary blob does on your Linux box. The ease of use is impressive, a new level for P2P-ish work since Napster/Kazaa/Limewire days.
Given the demographic of this site, I thought I'd be insulting everyone's intelligence by offering up a more verbose description. I mean the description is the command itself! And verifying the contents of the URL is as simple as viewing a web page (if anyone can't manage that then I wonder how they're reading that command to begin with :p).
With `curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts`, you know that the damage is contained to appending malicious data to /etc/hosts. Furthermore, the use of tee guarentees that you see the data that gets appended. Additionally the potential damage of malicious data in /etc/hosts is minimal if quickly detected and fixed.
It's not proof of piracy. It just proves that some bytes were downloaded. What, for example, if you could prove that you paid for the movie you're downloading? Lets say you buy a movie using the Video app on the Xbox, but want to watch it on your old Windows XP desktop, or on your Android phone?
Which is why copyright needs to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern age.
Though if you personally join the peer queue and serve over 30s of a movie to them, you've just proved that someone using that IP is pirating that movie. Even if you own the movie elsewhere, if I recall correctly many jurisdictions do not protect the personal transfer you're talking about. The laws are quite stupid here, but that's just how it is.
I'd be very surprised to learn there's a legal way for you to do this considering the movie you download on your Xbox is going to be PlayReady DRM encumbered.
1. You're downloading. This may or may not be copyright infringement, even if you do already have other licence[s] for the media. Check the licences and the law, if you can understand either.
2. If you're seeding, you're allowing others to download from you. If you're not licensed to do this by the copyright holder [if any], you might be infringing in certain jurisdictions.
https://github.com/neuromancer/popcorn-app
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.
> Hollywood studios (should) make their money in cinemas
I'd be just as happy if all movies went straight to streaming, I'd even be ok with higher prices closer to the release if they did drop down to reasonable levels after a period of time. I personally have grown to hate going to the theater, I find it much more enjoyable to watch movies in the comfort of my home without people talking, babies crying, and teenage girls on their cell phones the whole time. Not to mention I refuse to pay for concessions which are extremely over priced.
For decades, I've seen endless such "but it's free/easy/instant" things be anything but, insofar as it takes resources (time, fiddling, knowledge, skill, tools, etc) costing on par with paid versions, isn't easy for >90% of the population, and falls down often enough that it's hardly 'instant'.
$99 + $8/mo works a whole lot better than most any "free/easy/instant" solution I've seen. Sure, you may be one of the fringe consumers who can handle such solutions, but most people can't. There's always some part which is so dull/annoying/unsatisfying, but must be done right to achieve persistent widespread acceptance, that you'll have to pay (and recoup) someone to do.
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.
That's only because the home video market allowed people the luxury to legally watch any existing movie anytime they want, once they have purchased it, without the possibility of the studio revoking permission.
Don't worry - studios are already trying to think of ways to "fix" that (stream-only content that is never released in DVD format is one example)
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.
If you're shifting to a demand-driven system, then pieces aren't needed equally. A numerically even piece distribution isn't what the swarm most needs. Indeed, I start watching things on Netflix that I never finish, so having more people with early pieces of something would better mirror actual demand for them.
I'm sure that plenty of people in the Bittorrent community are worried about change, but plenty of people in every community are worried about change. Until I see some math or some simulations demonstrating that this can't work, I won't be persuaded that there's an actual problem beyond the (reasonable and legitimate) fear of change.
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).
I don't think the app really is useful when you weighs the risks.
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.
I hope they add TV shows with a nice interface for browsing seasons.
The cognitive dissonance, it burns.
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