Popcorn Time is an app that streams movies directly from torrents on to your computer, and it's seen its fair share of publicity, being lauded as a free Netflix alternative and chastised as an illegal file-sharing network.
After a brief legal scuffle influenced the original developers to abandon the app, a new set of devs took over the open-source Popcorn Time project, which is now available at popcorn-time.tv for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems.
While the original devs claim that they were doing nothing wrong legally, Popcorn Time has been described as a "Netflix for pirates," and is essentially that, letting its users stream the latest Hollywood blockbusters online for free.
When you watch a movie in the BitTorrent-powered Popcorn Time, the torrent file is being stored in a secret location on your hard drive, which is then seeded to other users at the same time. Once you restart your computer, the file is gone.
To make matters worse on the movie industry, anyone with the right cord can connect their computer to their high-def television for big-screen viewing. While there have been no original plans to add Chromecast support (unlike Show Box), the new devs of Popcorn Time hinted at the possibility of it in the near future in an interview with TorrentFreak.
Turns out, casting movies from Popcorn Time on a computer to an HDTV is as easy as using the Google Chrome web browser, making Popcorn Time even more enticing for thrifty movie watchers at home.
How You Could Cast Popcorn Time Movies
All it takes right now to cast movies to Chromecast is the Popcorn Time program on a computer, along with the Google Cast extension for Chrome.
The only thing Popcorn Time users would have to do is play a movie in the program, then enter a simple URL—http://127.0.0.1:8888—into their Chrome browser. This will enable Popcorn Time streaming in the browser, which can then be easily casted using the Cast this tab feature of the extension.
And that's all there is to it. Streaming of free Hollywood blockbusters right on your big-screen TV. It's like taking Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes and combining them into a totally free product. It's not the most moral way to get movies, but man do they make it easy.
There is also another version of Popcorn Time being maintained by another set of developers over at time4popcorn.eu, but they only support Windows computers, though they are working on mobile apps currently.
Some have stated that Popcorn Time may do to the film industry what Napster did to music, but we'll have to wait and see. What do you think?
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2 Comments
It's too bad PopCorn Hour does everything well, except play videos.
They constantly are adding new features, which is great, yet a very long list of bugs going back years, is largely ignored. Long time users, such as myself, have grown weary of the endless wait to get features fixed and working.
So my view of PopCorn adding Chromecast, is pfft, probably yet another bug that won't work quiet right, and will maybe not ever get fixed.
The Bigs - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Verizon- plan on taking you all prisoner. They made an enormous mistake in H'wood, first with the VCR, then with the DVD. They're going to try to get you taking stuff from them streaming which isn't as good as a hard file. With streaming off a website, they will have complete control over your watching films. Stay away from streaming, because they'll make you pay and pay. the IPod wouldn't play homemade mp3s that were not Apple, despite saying they would. You have to build your own system to resist being captured and used. The smart folks have never bought any software, never paid for any movies or tv and never endured an ad, because they could get rid of all of them. Going along with the software and maneuvering of the Bigs is for saps! With chromecast you just get to watch the mediocre junk that's streamed! I took mine back to the store. Too much trouble.
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