Users just have to hit play, relax, and watch anything they want

Jun 9, 2014 08:29 GMT  ·  By

Popcorn Time, an application that allows users to stream movies and TV shows directly from torrents without the use of a BitTorrent client, has reached version 0.3.1 Beta.

The software resides in a rather gray area. The title of the article says pretty much all you need to know about the application. Popcorn Time plays movies and TV shows from torrent sources in a very nice interface and it comes with a lot of features.

Some of you might immediately think that this is illegal and you would probably be right, but it only applies for some countries, not all of them. For example, Chile, Sweden, Portugal, and a quite a few others don't consider P2P sharing illegal. This might seem weird for people living in the “other” countries, but it's true.

Now that we got that out of the way, let's see what this software actually does. Users will be presented with a simple interface divided into Movies and TV Shows. The videos can be sorted by popularity, name, date, and genre. All users have to do is to hit play and they will be able to watch any movies they choose.

The interesting thing about the application is that it doesn't need to stream the entire file before playing it and it even supports subtitles, where available. It does use a temporary folder on the disk, but that folder is cleaned out when the software is closed.

This brings us to the software itself. It comes in the form of a binary file and users don't have to install it, just extract the archive and run it. It's open source and the source is hosted on Github, if you really want to take a peak.

According to the changelog, the latest version of Popcorn Time, 3.1 Beta, comes with some interesting changes. For example, Advanced Settings with Connection, DHT, and Tmp Folder options have been added, pressing the Escape key to close modals is now possible, subtitles are now searched by filename for better results, the subtitles are now draggable, and external subtitles are now supported.

There are a few problems with the software because this is still a Beta release. Some users might notice that the CPU is doing overtime when a movie is playing and it can crash from time to time.

You can download Popcorn Time 0.3.1 Beta from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be run on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.