A lot of you may have noticed we hit our user cap recently. We're excited by the growth and have no plans of slowing down now. In line with our plans to expand the user base, the user limit has been raised from 25k to 35k! We've got some momentum going and we don't want to stop it. Those of you with invites, please feel free to use them (in line with our rules, of course).

You may have also noticed that Pass the Popcorn has been making a real concerted push for quality and to keep that ball rolling we have some good news for all of the encoders and connoisseurs out there.

Missing.php has been completely revamped to be a much more comprehensive overview of the missing encodes on site where a source is available. In addition, it contains new functionality to perform searches with tag filters and sorting options.

As of recently, there are two new fields in the MediaInfo parser output - 'DXVA' and 'Minimum Settings'. The former is a compatibility check for DXVA and indicates DXVA support for the various software and hardware players that make use of it for smoother playback. 'Minimum Settings' is based on the requirement of certain encoding settings (specified in the x264 Coexisting and Trumping Guidelines) being met in order to produce (higher) quality encodes.

With the addition of these two new fields, we'd also like to introduce a new icon to indicate all high quality uploads. Behold, the golden popcorn ()! The golden popcorn will be applied manually by staff on a case by case basis to indicate an encode that is of the highest possible quality. We hope this new marker will help everyone make a more informed decision when deciding which rip to download and not have to rely only on certain metrics such as file size or release name.

While the dev blog has suffered from a lack of updates, many minor improvements and tweaks are being applied on a regular basis. Here's a list of updates from the past couple of months which more or less have gone by under the radar:

• Multiple trumpable tag support (thanks Machenic!)
• Codec, container, resolution and subtitle auto-detection on the upload page (thanks Machenic!)
• Subtitle manager moved to the upload page (thanks Machenic!)
• Improved, cross-browser compatible login/register page (thanks lerk08!)
• Torrent links are now parsed to display the movie and format name (thanks Chameleon/CC)!

And finally a bit of personal news. After what must be a couple of years staffing at Pass the Popcorn I am stepping down from my position as Director. As the site and my responsibilities on it have grown my personal life has gotten exponentially busier as well. With the staff page as solid as it is I feel confident that things will be more than fine without me. I love the site and while my user class may be changing you can't just get rid of me. Expect to see me downloading your uploads and posting in your threads just as much as always. Those of you who participate in Film Club should (hopefully) be happy to know I'll also continue to run that, so keep sending me your picks.

Thanks, see you all around.