Hi list,
Can some tech liberator out there versed in javascript and video
streaming please take over the popcorn-time project? It looks like it
was developed pseudonymously by at least three teams now which have all
disappeared (probably due to pressure from Hollywood).
If you haven't heard of it, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time
Why should this interest you?
* Licensed GPL v3
* Has the most user-friendly interface I've seen in a piece of free software
* Runs on GNU/Linux, OSX, Windows
* Streams downloads efficiently and uses Bittorrent to seed while the
user watches (with no setup or intervention by the user)
* Accessibility. Looks like the project is getting bullied with a game
of whack-a-mole, probably due to pressure from Hollywood. AFAICT there
is no new technology being used-- the original devs used mostly
pre-existing libs to make something that is easy to use. What everyone
on this list can do using Transmission and VLC can now be done by
non-experts.
How to stop the game of whack-a-mole?
There needs to be something like a "popcorn kernel" team. It should use
exactly the same API as the software currently does, but just have a
place where the user can type in an address from which to pull the
content. It'd be pretty easy to host a tracker with one or two public
domain titles and test with that. Then if a site like archive.org
decides to adopt the YTF API to access its public domain videos, users
can just add that address and start streaming the content. (And again
because they are also seeding this helps out archive.org, so it's a
win-win.)
That would remove the only controversial line of code-- the url of YTF--
so that anyone who wants to improve the software may do it without being
bullied. Also, if there were a well-known organization dedicated to
hosting and defending free software that could host the repo and front
page it would lower the risk of a rogue, suspicious site putting up
downloads with malware in them. (And each time Popcorn-time gets
resurrected at some new domain that risk increases.)
The original code is still on github. Not sure about the other
incarnations. It's worth noting that there seemed to be quite a bit of
activity on each incarnation (bug fixes, improvements) so it might be
worth it to try to find a link to the most recent incarnation. (And
since it's git it should be easy to audit the changes.)
I really wish I knew javascript and node.js. Then I'd just do it myself. :)
Best,
Jonathan
--
Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of
list guidelines will get you moderated:
https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change
to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected].
