Are you missing Popcorn Time, the now-defunct, mostly illegal site that let you stream movies for free, directly from your browser? Well, we've got good and bad news. Thanks to a new software called Torrents Time, you can now stream videos on The Pirate Bay. However, we're not sure it's a good idea. Read on.

Last week, torrent search engine The Pirate Bay added support for Torrents Time, a plug-in that lets you stream videos from The Pirate Bay (and other sites, should they choose to support it) directly, without ever downloading a torrent. You simply click on the little face-shaped icon underneath a video torrent, and a video stream will open in a new window — provided you have the Torrents Time software.

In the background, a torrent is still being downloaded, but you don't have to worry about it. Instead of having to deal with torrent files, or even having a BitTorrent client installed, the video just starts.

We've tested it, and after a loading period, it worked.

Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable

Unfortunately, we can't recommend Torrents Time to anyone at this point, for several reasons (not including moral ones, if you aim to watch copyrighted material).

First of all, The Pirate Bay itself abounds with shady ads, and it's quite possible that by clicking on the wrong thing you'll infect your computer with spyware or worse.

But even if you're used to that, to stream videos on the site you need to install the Torrents Time software, which is all degrees of shady in itself. After installation, the software just disappears. On my Mac, I couldn't find it in the Applications folder; it wasn't among the Chrome extensions either. It was impossible for me to find any sort of setting related to the app. The only way to uninstall it was to download a .sh script file (located at the bottom of the Torrents Time website) and run it manually.

Once run, Torrents Time was buggy. All major browsers are supposedly supported, but Safari didn't work for me at all. Chrome did, but the video was oddly stretched. Things were better in full-screen mode, but what appeared to be a preferences icon did not work. The list goes on.

Need more red warning signs? The Torrents Time site has minimal information on how the software works. Its creators' Twitter account has not tweeted yet. There's hardly anything on their Facebook page. We've sent an email to Torrents Time's official address, but it bounced.

According to TorrentFreak, the Torrents Time project is created by the same team that built Popcorn-Time.se — a fork and a follow-up of sorts to the ill-fated Pocporn Time. We've contacted them but have not yet heard from them.

In short, while the idea of streaming thousands of videos directly from The Pirate Bay might sound enticing, at this point we don't recommend it to anyone whose computer is not protected from viruses and malware, and who's not absolutely sure what they're doing.