Popcorn Time Is Back
With the demographics of HN and some of the topics that come up often (e.g., Linux, privacy, nostalgia for old-school forums, weird little micro-optimizations of peoples' lifestyles to achieve the "best" possible way to do a certain thing, etc.), I have always been a little bit surprised to see quite how many people personally use tools like Popcorn Time and how little mention of some forms of filesharing there is.I think it is worth looking into private trackers for anyone a bit more interested in media than the average person.  - There is almost no need to use any VPN service on these sites.

  - Quality control is unmatched; many sites have strict rules on what can be uploaded and general standards of uploads. Often this means that each torrent has mandatory screenshots for video quality comparisons, consistent track orders for bilingual releases, MediaInfo/BDInfo to allow you to know the contents before downloading (e.g., codecs, languages, audio channels, bitrates, etc.), source information to know what version of a film or series you're watching, and full ripping logs in the case of CDs/vinyl, etc.

  - There are also usually limited slots for torrents in a particular group (e.g., on some sites, a single film may have one or two 1080P encodes, one or two 720P encodes, one remux of the Blu-ray, and one untouched disc unless there are multiple significantly different masters available), meaning lower-quality releases will be trumped, removing the need to compare releases and pick. You can be confident you are downloading something decent on the first attempt. 

  - There is a tremendous amount of obscure, foreign, and rare content that cannot be found on public sources or streaming services. As an anecdote, take Ma vie en rose, a Belgian movie I wanted to watch. It wasn't on any streaming services with English subtitles, the American DVD was out of print, and the only HD release at the time was a Blu-ray for the Japanese market without English subs. While it was impossible to find on any public tracker or streaming service, I immediately found someone who took the effort and money to buy the DVDs for the subs, manually OCRed them to SRTs, purchased and ripped the Japanese Blu-ray, and remuxed it with the newly created English subs into a nice, single MKV for easy consumption.

  - Almost everything is well-seeded. Private trackers usually incentivize long-term retention of downloads, so regardless of how old something is, you can usually still download a copy.

  - The community. Many complain about opening up Netflix to a sea of overwhelming, infinite choices and being stuck just trying to pick anything. An advantage of the niche-specific private trackers compared to streaming services, public trackers, and Usenet, though, is that there are usually "collages" or lists of some sort where users will maintain what is essentially those IMDb lists or the random top-10 article-spam you'll find on Google, except it's all hand-picked content by people who are seriously, genuinely, and perhaps overly interested in the topic you're browsing. I rarely struggle to find something to watch/listen to because I can dial in a specific thing I am after, and someone will usually have already put in the effort of curating a list of the best content I have never heard of. 

  - And again, with regards to the community, the knowledge is cool. For anyone interested in the technical side of some of these topics, a lot of discussion and information is, unfortunately, locked up on member-only forums (not to mention the resources - e.g., for those interested in anime encoding & fansubbing, some of the Chinese trackers, in particular, are so valuable, be it for the untouched DVDs/Blu-ray sources or the guides and tools).



And don't get me wrong, I don't mean to sound like some insane person. I completely recognize that not everyone wants to/can dedicate the time, there is a barrier to entry, and it may simply not be how most people would like to consume media, etc. I also don't mean for this to sound negative about Popcorn Time -- it is very cool and solves real problems for many people.I am not that out of touch (I hope); I am just passionate ;-) Consume what you'd like, how you'd like, but I thought it might be worth proselytizing a little while I have the opportunity!