The rise of torrent streaming apps continues: IsoPlex launches

There have always been two options available when it comes to watching movies and videos made available as torrents. You could either download them to your system using a torrent client or start to stream them right away without saving them to the computer's hard drive.

When Popcorn Time came along, it catapulted the second method to a whole new level. While it did not change the streaming at all, it made the whole process more comfortable and easy to use.

Instead of having to browse third-party websites to find contents of interest, it allowed you to do so from within its interface in an elegant professional manner.

The original application was pulled quickly but spin-offs emerged that continued its legacy.

Isoplex is a new application by Isohunt which appears to be largely based on Popcorn Time as well. The application is available for Windows, Linux and Mac systems. It appears to be closed source though as the source code is not being made available at the time of writing.

The program displays a search form on start which is different from Popcorn Time which displayed a list of recent movies to start watching right away.

According to the website it is hosted on, it is powered by a database of more than one million movies. The search accepts titles only which you can filter by genre on the results page.

One thing that feels rather strange is that the year is always listed as 2014 regardless of the actual year the movie has been released.

When you hover the mouse over a cover it will display options to play the movie in various qualities or open the details page in the app for additional information about it.

A plot summary, playing time and category are displayed here among other things. Here you can also click on the watch trailer button to play a trailer if available, and start playback of the movie after you have selected the desired quality.

The movie database is not as extensive as the 1 million title figure makes it appear to be. If you search for Star Wars for instance, you only get Episode III and V returned while the remaining four episodes are not available.

The same is true for Star Trek which only lists one movie or Lord of the Rings which does not list a single result (unless you search exactly for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring).

The search lacks in other regards as well. If you search for godfather you do not get a result, but if you search for the godfather, you get a result.

The application is made available as an early alpha release -- version 0.0.2 hints at that -- which may mean that it will be improved in the future to address these issues.

For now, it is more of  a proof of concept than something that you can really make use of unless you are lucky and enter the right search terms.

Note: Depending on where you live, using the application to watch movie streams or using it at all may or may not be illegal.

The rating will be adjusted if future versions improve the functionality of the software.