PickyPirate: Metacritic Meets BitTorrent

Written by Ernesto on November 21, 2007 

It’s not hard to determine what’s hot on BitTorrent, just go to your favorite BitTorrent site and order the results by most seeds or peers. However, finding out what’s popular by people “in the know” usually requires some more steps.

PickyPirate: Metacritic Meets BitTorrent

This is exactly the gap PickyPirate is trying to fill. PickyPirate fetches the most popular movies, games and music albums from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, two well known review aggregators, and lists them on the frontpage.

For those not familiar with meta-review sites, these websites make a ranking of the movies, games and music albums that received the best reviews from critics. The links to these entries on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes are of course included and there you can read the full reviews.

Ehud, the developer of PickyPirate told TorrentFreak that a friend asked him why nobody created a mashup of BitTorrent and Metacritic, “I immediately thought ‘Hey, that’s a really good idea!’” he said. “Basically I never know what to download from all the stuff that’s available.”

The site currently lists most popular items from the last 30 days for all categories (Music, Movies, PC Games, Xbox 360 and Wii). The lists are updated every 15 minutes, so if the scores change on Metacritic, they will be quickly updated on PickyPirate too.

If you click on one of the items on the frontpage it automatically lists all the “relevant torrents” available on The Pirate Bay and Mininova for that title, but more sites might be added later.

BitTorrent users have a huge amount of material at their fingertips and as such, they can afford to be very picky indeed. However, not everyone has the time to be picky but with the help of sites like this, allowing others to do it on your behalf can come a good second.

Previously: MediaDefender Leaks Cost The Company $825,000

Next: Marvel and DC Comics Join Forces to Target BitTorrent

45 Responses

Pages: [1] 2 » Show All

1 Nov 21, 2007 at 21:04 by Windexglow

Nice idea =)

2 Nov 21, 2007 at 21:08 by Hortz

Great idea :)

3 Nov 21, 2007 at 21:15 by Matt Hodstone

Wow, I love this idea.

4 Nov 21, 2007 at 21:22 by PhishyBongwaters

Fantastic idea!

Would be nice if they integrated a quality assurance type dealy by using actual release reviews.

I.E. they use the metrics from the critic sites as a value, but also work in what the pirates are saying about a given release.

Look at it this way, say the movie in question is transformers. You’d bring up the relevant torrents, but you are still on your own as to if those torrents are solid and scene standard.

Would be nice if they take that headache away aswell, so the torrents show up, and are rated by release name and quality within the torrent results.

There’s atleast a few sites doing scene reviews, so it isn’t completely impossible ;)

5 Nov 21, 2007 at 21:25 by TotalWimp

Sweet site!

6 Nov 21, 2007 at 21:55 by Ole

Greatest idea ever!

7 Nov 21, 2007 at 21:56 by b

Hehe… search needs some work. #3 in music right now is 45:33 by LCD Soundsystem, if you click on that it gives you “Complete Mozart Edition - All 45 Volumes”, “Dream Dance Vol 45″, …

Neat idea though.

8 Nov 21, 2007 at 21:59 by Ole

PhishyBongwaters’s idea is good. I also hope more categories and subcategories will be added in the future.

And since I’m a Picky Pirate: [..], and does it’s best to match it[..] in the description: “it’s” should be “its”.

:)

9 Nov 21, 2007 at 22:40 by bob

good idea just needs a rss feed

10 Nov 21, 2007 at 22:45 by Deimon

Another great idea. And another new bookmark.

11 Nov 21, 2007 at 22:50 by TwentyFour

awesome :D

12 Nov 21, 2007 at 22:52 by Roel

Wonderful!

Less known artists might get a chance with the help of this initiative. Another reason for bans/directors to go torrentway.

13 Nov 21, 2007 at 23:28 by mach

awesome stuff ;)

14 Nov 21, 2007 at 23:32 by KungfuTornado

Great!! And i agree an RSS feed would be cool!

15 Nov 21, 2007 at 23:33 by mach

plz add:

mac appz, graphics

16 Nov 22, 2007 at 00:07 by Ghoomba

What a stupid bloody idea..

Choose what you dl by what is considered popular by other people? Yeah.. right.. will do…

Quite frankly I would trust the human race en mass to tell me how to tie my shoe laces, never mind to “advise” me what I should find good to watch/listen/play.

Humans en mass are nothing but an ignorant, dimwitted, bigotted, unthinking, misguided, illeducated, easily led entity, worthy of nothing but scourn.

Individuals are ok, but put a bunch of them in a room and ask them their “opinion” and the “stupid factor” suddenly kicks in.

17 Nov 22, 2007 at 00:11 by Roflcer of the Lawl

Nice I’ll try it out

18 Nov 22, 2007 at 00:39 by LiquidEyes

Nice idea but I’ll stick with Releaselog to help me out.

19 Nov 22, 2007 at 00:50 by KOsherR

Wow - supernice!!

20 Nov 22, 2007 at 00:59 by Dave

@Ghoomba: Metacritic uses weighted critic scores to rate content. The most respected reviewers having more weight. So it isn’t just what’s most popular.

21 Nov 22, 2007 at 01:13 by Ehud

Hi everyone,
Thanks for your comments, I appreciate them very much.
I’m already thinking about some of your suggestions which were interesting.

If you find the site useful, please Digg it and spread the word.

22 Nov 22, 2007 at 02:23 by tch

I wouldn’t mind more listings, maybe 60-100 in each category or so.

Ace idea though, the only thing missing really is reviews to go with them but they’re easily enough found,

23 Nov 22, 2007 at 02:23 by Crap

Crap.

24 Nov 22, 2007 at 04:28 by Guido

@Goomba: Some humans are not only ignorants and dimwitts not only en mass but as individuals as well.

Pages: [1] 2 » Show All

Responses are closed

All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.