Who doesn’t want to watch movie or TV shows? But you either need to use some pirated version or get Netflix, Hotstar or Amazon Prime subscription to watch them. Here is a simple method that lets you watch movies and TV shows without downloading. Since you are not downloading the movie to your computer, you are not doing anything illegal, as such. Meet Popcorn Time, which is a free cross-platform software that allows you to watch movies and TV shows.
Watch Movies & TV shows on Popcorn Time
To get started, you need to download and install this software on your computer. After opening it, you need to use a VPN software. However, this is not mandatory. Popcorn Time wants you to be on the safe side. After opening this tool on your computer, you can find a window like this-
From here, you would be able to choose the movie category, movie or TV show. To watch a movie or TV show, click on it.
You can choose the language, picture quality (720p or 1080p), etc. It is also possible to watch the trailer before watching the movie or show. If you click the WATCH IT NOW button, it will start streaming your film or TV show. It takes a couple of moments for buffering, but it depends on your internet speed.
The software also comes with IMDB rating. You can click on the star rating button after opening any TV show or movie to check the reviews as well. You can also choose a default language, theme, font size, and cache folder.
For your information, you can delete the download cache folder on exit as well. To do that, open Settings and select the checkbox that says Clear cache folder on exit.
If you want, you can download Popcorn Time from popcorn-time.to.
Also read: VidMasta software lets you watch Movies and TV shows online.
“Since you are not downloading the movie to your computer, you are not doing anything illegal.” – this is false. Popcorn time does download the movie onto your local PC, it just plays it as it goes instead of waiting for the whole thing to be finished downloading
Don’t get to excited about this, these “free” movies are still torrents and torrent files are still susceptible to malware injection and now you are going to use an application to run these torrents on the fly. My gut tells me that there will be some vulnerability in the way this application reads and executes the torrents for the movies and all it will take it one guy in the torrent files network to upload his “special” version with the exploit to the inevitable vulnerability popcorn will have and your owned.
My only suggestion would to run this application in a sandbox or with an account that has very low privileges on the system you are using.
James is right if you are seeing it on your computer you have downloaded it in some fashion. The fact is, you can’t see it unless the bits are your system and if the bits-be-there you have illegally downloaded the movie.
Unless something has changed in the latest version it does download files (Torrents). It just deletes them as soon as they are finished and the client is closed. Start a stream and check the folder locations for the file. There is also an option to disable delete on close so the file stays with you after the client is closed.