Zona is a Popcorn Time Beater and a Pirate’s Dream

[shamu726]

If Popcorn Time shook things up, Zona is going to shake them apart. Not only does Zona look as good, if not better than Popcorn TIme, it streams tens of thousands of movies and TV shows plus millions of music tracks. Did we mention switchable audio languages, subtitles and permanent downloading? What about TV show subscription, plus live TV and radio from around the world? An Android version?

Popcorn Time has had more than its fair share of press since it appeared earlier this year. The tale has enjoyed twists and turns in buckets, not to mention controversy and mystery.

The software was undoubtedly a game changer and the most simple and elegant way of downloading and viewing content using torrents. Nothing came close.

Except all along something else did – and then some.

Let’s not take anything away from it, Popcorn Time is pretty neat, but the software just introduced to TorrentFreak goes much, much further. It’s called Zona and could very well ignite an even bigger storm.

Zona hails from Russia but fear not, its 27mb installer appears in standard English. Getting the thing working is child’s play too, just make sure it’s being allowed through your firewall after setup. If users want it to become their standard torrent downloader that option is available too, but advanced users will probably prefer the flexibility of their regular client.

Once setup is complete, users are presented with the following screen, movies up first. Much of the artwork depicted is pulled from Russian sources, so for non-speakers a reliance on movie covers will be required. If that fails, directly under each movie is the title in clear English.

Click those titles and new page will appear, detailing everything people might want to know about the movie including its date of production, iMDb rating, genre, actors (including photos), runtime, and other sundry details. Here’s the page for the Creative Commons movie, Big Buck Bunny.

When selecting a movie a choice can be made – to stream Popcorn Time-style, or to download to the PC like a regular torrent client. If the former is chosen there is a wait of between a few seconds and a minute while enough buffering takes place. The movie is first presented in a small non-intrusive window in the left corner of the app, but this can be expanded to any size, including full screen.

Eagle-eyed viewers will note the ‘audio and subtitles’ text on the bottom right of the window above. This enables switching between English and often Russian audio, plus the toggling of various subtitles.

While Popcorn Time was restricted to content indexed on YTS, Zona has no such limitation. The app appears to have access to many, many thousands of movies pulled from torrent sites around the web. It is not clear where, but random searches hardly ever fail to turn up the required content although sometimes playback can hesitate, possibly due to lack of seeds. That said, a database of 500,000 torrents should be more than enough.

Zona is no slouch on the movie front, but it isn’t done yet. The software also caters to the TV fan and does it with never-seen-before flair. After selecting ‘TV’ from the list on the left, Zona presents TV shows in the same way as it does movies. However, when clicking through to the details screen one can see how it excels, with options to select any series and any episode. Since it’s topical, here’s how the page looks for Game of Thrones.

Just below the recommended additional viewing graphics, one can see options to select a series and episode. Clicking on those brings up all of the sources, usefully filtered by video quality. Also on offer is a “subscription” feature, which allows people to subscribe to a series ‘Tivo-style’, leave the software running, and have the content appear when a new episode is released.

Another trick up Zona’s sleeve is its ability to steam live TV from a selection of built in channels. While many are Russian, there are plenty of English language channels too. Covering everything from news, to light entertainment to documentaries, it’s also particularly strong in sport, with free access to UK premium channels including all Sky Sports and BT Sport channels.

After ticking every box on the video front, Zona goes one step further by streaming music too. Users need to quickly sign up for a VK.com social networking account first, but after that almost every track one can think of will become available in the software.

Conclusion

Overall, it’s hard to fault Zona. It looks great and works nearly as well. There’s a huge range of content spanning movies, TV shows and music, and no other app that we’re aware of has as many options and features. It’s not open source, at least that we can see, so one up for Popcorn Time there. But it can stream to DLNA-enabled TVs, so that might balance things up a bit.

Oh, and you can filter out the adult content if kids are around. We did mention it does porn as well, didn’t we? No? That means we probably forgot to mention the Android version too.

Zona can be downloaded from its homepage, or directly here.

Source: TorrentFreak

Edited April 26, 2014 by shamu726

[Fantasy]

Looks really good.

[Bob1st]

Could I get a mirror? Thanks, not even getting 1 kb..

[shamu726]

Could I get a mirror? Thanks, not even getting 1 kb..

Zona 1.0.4.6: ZonaSetup_latest.exe

Edited April 26, 2014 by shamu726

[Sliuown]

The movie quality is not quite as good as Popcorntime, but it got tons more options, damn nice program!

[mray88]

Looks interesting, but I was a little surprised when it didn't come up clean on virustotal. Even more surprised when VT uploaded the file from me --- no one had checked it yet??? Not sure exactly what the positives are worth in this instance ( 5 of 48 ), but I suppose it's something to think about.

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/8233bca34d52c00a5394b3ea1acc3c33075a521f38472c21cdd672a6f71a25bc/analysis/1398540366/

Thoughts?

[go0gle]

Looks interesting, but I was a little surprised when it didn't come up clean on virustotal. Even more surprised when VT uploaded the file from me --- no one had checked it yet??? Not sure exactly what the positives are worth in this instance ( 5 of 48 ), but I suppose it's something to think about.

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/8233bca34d52c00a5394b3ea1acc3c33075a521f38472c21cdd672a6f71a25bc/analysis/1398540366/

Thoughts?

I use webroot (which isnt even included on virustotal) and it also reports as W32.Malware.Gen!

[AlexCross]

False positive...

[Escritoire]

Hello all,

"La mariée était trop belle...".

The program seems to try to install, amongst other PUP.Optional.Zona

More infos from " http://malwaretips.com/blogs/pup-optional-zona-removal/ " (Malwarebyte)

PUP.Optional.Zona is a specific detection used by Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and other antivirus products to indicate and detect a Potentially Unwanted Program.
A potentially unwanted application is a program that contains adware, installs toolbars or has other unclear objectives.

PUP.Optional.Zona it’s technically not a virus, but it does exhibit plenty of malicious traits, such as rootkit capabilities to hook deep into the operating system, browser hijacking, and in general just interfering with the user experience. The industry generally refers to it as a “PUP,” or potentially unwanted program.
The PUP.Optional.Zona infection is used to boost advertising revenue, as in the use of blackhat SEO, to inflate a site’s page ranking in search results.

PUP.Optional.Zona got on your computer after you have installed a freeware software (video recording/streaming, download-managers or PDF creators) that had bundled into their installation this browser hijacker. This Potentially Unwanted Propgram is also bundled within the custom installer on many download sites (examples: CNET, Brothersoft or Softonic), so if you have downloaded a software from these websites, chances are that PUP.Optional.Zona was installed during the software setup process.

PUP.Optional.Zona is an ad-supported (users may see additional banner, search, pop-up, pop-under, interstitial and in-text link advertisements) cross web browser plugin for Internet Explorer (BHO) and Firefox/Chrome (plugin) and distributed through various monetization platforms during installation. The browser extension includes various features that will modify the default or custom settings of the browser including the home page, search settings and in some cases will modify Internet Explorer’s load time threshold, place a lock file within Firefox to prevent competing software from changing its settings as well as disable the browser’s Content Security Policy in order to allow for cross site scripting of the plugin.

Virustotal warns about an adware and .... : https://www.virustotal.com/fr/file/de12642322797508879ddb169080fa381fa62d5f116bfaf104c96b62c11ee605/analysis/

Are there any of you who have news about this ?

Just my 2 pence...

Best regards to all

Escritoire

[mray88]

@ Escritoire --

Thanks for the additional info, very helpful.

Between VirusTotal and the extra Malwarebytes info I think I would stay away from this until things are a bit more clear with this software. Sounds interesting though, but needs further research.

Edited April 26, 2014 by mray88

[Escritoire]

Hello all,

Sorry I forgot to say that Eset SS 7.0.302.26 prevented to let me go to the site.

And I didn't force it to.

Just my txo pences...

Regards you all.

Escritoire

Edited April 26, 2014 by Escritoire

[Alanon]

Hm... I wasn't aware there were apps such as this.. Out of curiosity, what are the advantages of these " entertainment suites" over a good high-speed film torrent?

[spudboy]

VirusTotal gives me 8/50

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/353728512d503a0362878e1ab0f16fc8c2e9aa577ee3eb1f067019e293a845d9/analysis/1398555884/

[jackieo]

ok i see the best safest way is still just downloading the torrent and watching it on vlc, screw all this site-page-rank-injection bullcrap.

dam ....cant anyone just create something useful that doesnt do shit behind our backs? sheesh....

[Reefa]

Just scanned with hitman pro my favorite for pup's and all clean..So iv'e installed and very happy..Thanks @shamu726

[air_pull91]

its not clean program right?
i've tried popcorn n flixtor..

Edited April 28, 2014 by air_pull91

[OrbingStorm]

bitdefender ranks the page as safe.for now I will wait and see no rush.

[Cerberus]

I looked at this and it does install some questionable things like conduit which gathers info on your system. I hate that crap....its found in a lot of apps. I always have to manually uninstall them. Think I will stick with XBMC for now....its safe. :)