Raspberry Support

Popcorn Time doesn't run out-of-the-box on a Raspberry Pi 4. Do let it run, we need to take a few additional steps, as mentioned below:

# First flash Raspbian Buster on SD card. I used "Raspberry Pi OS with desktop" from
# https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-32-bit
# After installation, that most probably involves reboots, launch terminal window and execute 
# the following bash commands

# Update everything
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

# Install NodeJS 14. Raspbian version cannot go higher than NodeJS 10; use following line instead
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

# Install Gulp and Yarn
sudo npm install yarn -g
sudo npm install gulp -g

# Fetch the repo
git clone -b v0.4.9 https://github.com/popcorn-official/popcorn-desktop.git
cd popcorn-desktop

# And run installer
yarn install

# Build project
gulp build

# This release doesn't have arm support for nw.js. So we also need to download those libraries. 
# Fortunately those can be found here: https://github.com/LeonardLaszlo/nw.js-armv7-binaries 
# Use v0.46.5, as that one closest matches the version in the 0.4.9 release
wget -c https://github.com/LeonardLaszlo/nw.js-armv7-binaries/releases/download/v0.46.5/v0.46.5.tar.gz

# Extract `chrome sdk` dist
tar -xzvf v0.46.5.tar.gz dist/nwjs-sdk-chrome-ffmpeg-branding/nwjs-sdk-v0.46.5-linux-arm.tar.gz --to-command='tar -xzvf -'

# Now replace the linux32 folder containing non arm code with the one we just extracted
rm -rf cache/0.44.5-sdk/linux32
mv nwjs-sdk-v0.46.5-linux-arm/ cache/0.44.5-sdk/linux32

# And remove the download
rm v0.46.5.tar.gz

# All set; run it
sudo gulp run

There are, obviously, a bunch of caveats: the client seems to be very slow. Connecting to peers is slow as well. And for some reason in full screen the UI sometimes doesn't seem to be fading out. But I'm sure that the programmers would be able to iron out these problems.

Enjoy

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• Source(s): @MarByteBeep