The new developers are fighting to keep it alive

Jan 4, 2016 12:40 GMT  ·  By

Popcorn Time is an application that simply refuses to die, and it looks like the community has managed to keep it alive. In fact, the new version is named Popcorn Time Community Edition and it’s still up and working.

A few weeks ago, a couple of developers from the original Popcorn Time project were identified, and they were forced to stop working on the application. Soon after, the official domain disappeared and any development on Popcorn Time stopped. The thing is that Popcorn Time is an open source application, and anyone has access to the source code.

It didn’t take long until the community organized and managed to release the application to the public, this time with an addition to the name. Thus, Popcorn Time Community Edition was born, but not for long. Soon after the app was reborn, some of the people that were hosting the official website were contacted by the MPAA, and they were forced to drop the domains.

Popcorn Time is still working, sort of

The community is organized mostly on Reddit, and they update that particular post all the time, with the latest fixes and information. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep the application working, but it looks like things should improve in the coming months.

The Popcorn Time Community Edition still has a lot of problems, and it requires constant maintenance. I couldn't get it to work for movies, only for TV Shows, but there is probably a solution for this issue in the Reddit thread.

There are binary builds available for all the platforms, although the Linux builds seem to be a little harder to make it work.

Popcorn Time sits in a rather gray legal area. It’s illegal to use in most countries, but there are a few, in the European Union at least, that allow users to run applications like Popcorn Time. Before you decide to use it, please make sure that it’s OK to do so in your country.

More details about the Popcorn Time Community Edition are available on the official website.

Update: There is another version of Popcorn Time available right now, with details in another subreddit, /popcorntime. That version integrates trojans and malware, as seen in this report.