After reading this in the paper edition, and cloning the repos from popcorntime.io, I actually found the UI rather pleasant. Certainly easier to find something than on Netflix -- and the recommendations seemed more relevant (even without any "profile").

Anyway, I wasn't aware that the underlying streaming torrent thing was a stand-alone project -- so if you have a source of torrent/magnet-links (say a folder, rss...) you can actually stream straight to vlc/mplayer quite easily.

https://github.com/mafintosh/torrent-stream