I’ve seen many funny names for private torrent trackers, DDL forums and streaming sites during my time but this one gets the prize. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you say ‘Picrap’? Yeah, you guessed correct – it’s ‘piece of crap’. Picrap.com is a new movie and TV show steaming site that launched just recently. While it has an odd sounding name, the service works great and actually seems to hold a lot of promise. It’s a free TV show and movie streaming site which works from anywhere in the world (and not just from the United States like Hulu and numerous others). Although it hasn’t been a while since launch, Picrap already indexes episodes from over 1000 different TV shows, several hundred movies and a large number of movie trailers. In case you were wondering, streaming video content featured on this site do not come directly from rights holders. This removes any restrictions usually put forth by publishers and Picrap is able to index even the latest TV episodes without delay.
If video streams are not offered by rights holders then where do they come from? They are fetched from file sharing sites such as MegaVideo, ZShare, Wisevid and DivXDen. Picrap does not host any of the streamed video which essentially makes it a search engine for steaming content. However, the service is capable of playing most video streams from within Picrap.com itself, without redirecting visitors to an external site. There are advertisements in the web interface but I am yet to run across popups, pop unders or any other type of intrusive ad formats. Video quality is usually pretty good and in fact, most of the streams Picrap fetches have scene released HDTV rips as the video source:
Finding a TV show on Picrap is pretty easy. You can search for the show by it’s name - each TV show has it’s own page where all available episodes are listed (Note that the main TV shows page on Picrap does not list all of the indexed shows – you can use the search feature to avoid this minor annoyance). Clicking on an episode will take you to a separate page with an embedded video player and a list of available video streams. You can watch any of the listed streams but it looks as if MegaVideo sources are recommended – they can be played from within Picrap itself, can be played full screen, they stream without delay and the MV player has a pretty decent set of options. When you try to watch the newest episode of a show, you might sometimes get ‘Removed due to infringement’ message. In this case you can try another stream or just wait till another copy gets uploaded.
In addition to basic episode listing and streaming functionality, Picrap has some additional features which makes life easier for its users. For instance, you can use the built in TV guide to watch latest episodes of currently airing series instantly. There are separate RSS feeds for movies and TV shows, ability to report broken links as well as a list of most popular TV shows on site.
Picrap is a completely free service and does not even require registration. Hopefully, the site will survive interference from rights holders and stay online for a long time to come – this is a pretty useful site.
[Click Here] to visit Picrap Homepage
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