Back in October 2008, we reviewed a site called SceneMovies. It was an ambitious new specialized movie tracker that was one of the first few sites to use Gazelle. A couple of months later, SceneMovies changed its name to PassThePopcorn (PTP). Now, an year and 14000+ torrents later, PassThePopcorn reigns as one of the largest online movie libraries on the net. With features like awesome ‘Collections’, detailed movie info with cover art and trailers, ‘similar movie map’, staff recommendations, indexing by director/actor, etc, PTP is a private torrent tracker that any serious movie lover should not miss.
What the title says about 10000 movies is true. PTP currently tracks over 14500 active torrents which span across 9975+ movies by ~6700 directors and around 85000 different actors. The site’s user base comprises of 14000+ registered members. These excellent stats were achieved within a single year, even amidst a significant data loss back in last April. Note that PTP is not just a torrent tracker – it’s an online information repository about movies, directors and actors. Movie description pages are incredibly detailed – covert art, movie info, cast details, trailers and similar movie torrents can all be found in the same page. Try clicking on the name of an actor in a detailed torrent description window – it’ll lead you to an ‘actor info’ page where images, actor details and even other movie torrents by the same actor is indexed.
Another great and much talked about feature in PTP is their ‘Collections’ - Collections are sets of torrents that belong to a specific theme. After ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ which received wide publicity in BitTorrent related sites, PTP has added several more kick ass Collections to their list - some of them can be seen in the screenshot below:
Note that some of these collections are still works in progress – new torrents are being added to these all the time. Apart from movies, PTP has taken the time to add some rare content such as stand up comedy, musicals and concerts. Right now these categories do not have that many torrents but they definitely seem to be expanding.
As the content improved, PTP’s user interface also evolved. The site now has no less than 13 different stylesheets some of which look really cool. The ‘cineaste’ skin is my personal favorite.
Did we forget to mention that PTP runs on Gazelle codebase? Add the great organization features and speed that come with Gazelle to an already feature and content rich private tracker – you’ve got an online movie library which the MPAA and the likes would never be able to produce.
At the time this article was being written, signups were open. In case they have closed by the time you read this, you can always ask for an invite on their official invites IRC channel.
Site Name: Pass The Popcorn (http://passthepopcorn.org)
Signup URL: http://passthepopcorn.org/register.php
Invites IRC Channel: irc://irc.passthepopcorn.org/invite (Follow instructions in channel topic). IRC Noob? Read this first.
