Project Description
A while back I heard about an illegal free streaming service called ‘Popcorn Time’. I was wondering how the service worked, where they got their database from, and what technology they used.
Disclaimer
This project was made out of pure curiosity, and for educational purposes only. I do not condone pirating. The software, source code, and build, will not be made public out of respect for the movie industry.
The Idea
As mentioned I wondered how ‘Popcorn Time’ was able to find so many movies and series, and being able to stream them without being taken down by authorities.
As it turns out the ‘Popcorn Time’ project is/was open-source, meaning I could take a look under the hood. I found out that they use a few databases to find the content. These databases contain links to Torrent files and/or hashes, with those the user can stream the content though the peer-to-peer network. This all without ‘Popcorn Time’ being involved in the streaming process.
I wanted to see if I could make a piece of software that access the same database, in this case I limited myself to the movie database.
Experience
During this project I learned how to access, parse, and manipulate data provided by a JSON REST API. Also I learned how to make an UI for my application so that I can display the data in a readable way.
