Popcorn Time Desktop

Popcorn Time Desktop is a free, open source (GPL-3.0), cross-platform BitTorrent client with a built-in media player, designed to stream movies, TV shows and anime directly from torrents. The application shows the available titles as a poster wall, allowing users to browse movies, TV shows and anime by genre. Additionally, users can search the catalogue and sort it by popularity, title, rating, year or date added to quickly find their desired content.

Popcorn Time Desktop does not host any videos itself: it finds torrents of movies and TV episodes through public APIs and starts playback while the file is still downloading, using sequential download over the BitTorrent protocol. Titles are offered in 720p or 1080p quality when such torrents exist, and downloaded files are kept in a cache folder that can be cleared on exit. Additionally, the settings let users choose the interface language, theme and font size, change the cache folder and enlarge or reduce the covers of the library.

The program is built on NW.js and started as a fork of the Butter Project. Subtitles in many languages can be loaded for movies and episodes, titles can be added to bookmarks or marked as watched, and trailers can be played from the details page. Streaming copyrighted content through torrents is illegal in many countries and the IP address of the user is visible to other peers, so the app can warn before downloading when no VPN is active. The torrent-based desktop client is no longer developed: its GitHub repository now leads to a rebuilt Popcorn Time project.

Popcorn Time Desktop lets users start watching movies and TV shows from torrents without waiting for the whole download to finish.

Popcorn Time Desktop features:

• A poster-based interface for movies, TV shows and anime
• Torrent streaming with a built-in video player
• 720p and 1080p quality where available
• Subtitles in many languages
• Search and sorting by popularity, rating, year and more
• Bookmarks, watched marks and trailers
• Settings for language, theme, font size and cache folder