People mainly use it for torrenting. It's nice in theory since it allows you to watch basically anything without having to download it first. It will find and download Torrents on demand and start playing them after a small buffer has been built.
But stremio users are only active on a given Torrent while watching its content. Meaning that they contribute nothing back to the network. If everyone (or a large enough percentage of users) would act like this the whole (public) BitTorrent Network would no longer work.
How is that nothing? They would be seeding the whole time while watching.
That's why private trackers are the best. As a member you're mandated to seed what you download for a minimum amount of time or data, which IMHO should be mandatory for P-2-P networks, otherwise the whole concept falls apart if everyone is selfish and only does hit-and-runs.
After almost a decade on private trackers (used to carefully ensure to seed from my laptop even in college when I didn't have much Internet hours or home connection during my early career as it was too costly) and remaining a model citizen I was finally banned by admin(s) of a top tracker for "suspected" fraudulent activities or cheating. That is it. Suspected and banned. Suspected where? On an unrelated social media site because I respectfully criticized a tracker.
When people say private trackers are by teens or (wo)man-teens with extremely fragile egos I always thought it was nuts until I came across some. They are really trigger happy and touchy.
I made peace with it. Slowly let all go of all the accounts. Just let it be. I first thought I will reach out to them for a/c deletions etc, but then I thought it was not worth it. Besides it's all a "seedbox dump" (I had one during my last 5-6 years there, so yeah I am guilty as well) and there's no community. Hoard and seed and hoard and seed and no talking about it and if you talk you always have to walk on egg shells. So it has not been the same. Not since the days of WCD; and that too is a maybe.
I'm on 3 private ones and the content and the communities are great and never got banned or had any issues. I just kept my head down, stayed under the radar, kept chats and interactions to a minimum and only on content topics, and it was smooth sailing for over 10 years.
Basically I treat the trackers only as places to upload and download and that's it, not as places for social interactions like Reddit or HN, as that's where diverging opinions and egos can clash and you can can find yourself banned due to sensitive members abusing the flag button or touchy mods. Similarly how I wouldn't start religious or political debates at work or hit on women there, the risk is too high to offend someone and the rewards basically non existent. It's not worth it. Keep social interaction only on social media, and trackers only for piracy, without mixing them together, and you'll be good.
I am not convinced. They contribute while watching, which is more than nothing by any metrics I can imagine. Depending on the situation, I can totally imagine that they distribute the file 10 times while they watch it.
How do you come to this conclusion? The average residential home upload speed is abysmal.
This comes with 10Mbps of upstream bandwidth.
And no, that's not a ton -- but it is substantially more than the bitrate of the h.265/HEVC films I may tend to watch.
If I were streaming with torrents, I would be able to give back more than I consume during the runtime of such a film.
All the media in the world and no waiting at all. It works better than any streaming platform.
Watch for an update to Stremio in the near future with a toggle for 'participate in torrent sharing while not watching' ..
I suspect stremio seeds torrents in the cache directory, so if you increase cache size, you can potentially continue seeding torrents for more time after the initial download.
https://github.com/Stremio/stremio-features/issues/626
Somebody made an extension that adds cached torrents to your local qbittorrent instance though, which is a nice alternative.
https://github.com/Vance-ng-vn/Stremio-Seeds
Note: I haven't used this, since I use Stremio from a Chromecast.
> We run non-intrusive ads occassionally
(Their typo, not mine.)
So it's like Plex, but, with ads in it.
> Stremio is a modern media center that gives you the freedom to watch everything you want.
[1] https://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10....
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
You'd think this wouldn't work well, but if done properly it'd be at worst equivalent to the current experience (e.g. your entire stream comes only from the closest content server), but Netflix shows tend to have popularity trends so may actually perform better than the current experience because you might be watching the same show as your neighbor, just 20-30 minutes later, and this reduces load on the content servers and raises the overall throughput availability of the total network.
This likely depends on the codec. The Pi 4’s BCM2711 SoC, unlike the BCM2712 in the Pi 5, has hardware support for H.265 (HEVC) up to 4Kp60. However, the Pi 5 can still support H.265 (HEVC) up to 4Kp60 through software-based decoding, thanks to its more powerful CPU and GPU.
My goal really is to have a sleek, up to date TV OS that doesn't rely on me buying a specific TV or replacing it every 5 years when it stops receiving app updates.
I ended up going with a full Windows Intel N100 mini-PC. Windows because the only way to get 4K Netflix is to either use the Windows app, or Microsoft Edge on Windows. [0] Any Linux would limit me to 720p. And even then others like Max do not support 4K on Windows [1]. I believe Disney+ is the same.
Another choice I wasn't aware of when I got my hardware is Kodi running as an app on an official Android box with Widevine Level 1. Kodi is able to use Android's Winevine allowing for full quality 4K playback through plugins for Netflix [2], Max [3], Disney+ [4]. It leaves you reliant on these (open-source) plugin rather than official apps for all the good and bad.
[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23931
[1] https://help.max.com/US-en/Answer/Detail/000002523
[2] https://github.com/CastagnaIT/plugin.video.netflix?tab=readm...
[3] https://www.matthuisman.nz/2024/06/max-kodi-add-on.html
[4] https://www.matthuisman.nz/2020/04/disney-plus-kodi-add-on.h...
Ideally for something I'll run on my TV, I'll want something likely to continue receiving support.
I imagine Streamio is more likely to continue receiving support/updates as long as they're focused on maintaining the platform.
If there's an official Lineage Android TV for RPi or x86 that'd of course be ideal.
Dynalink and Walmart Onn (2021) https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/dopinder/
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/wade/
Radxa zero SBC https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/radxa0/
Google Chromecast with Google TV (4K) (check on XDA thread, I'm not sure on the current status on bootloader and Widevine) https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sabrina/
For Raspberry Pi, there's konstakang's unofficial builds https://konstakang.com/
As far as their app goes, it's a really good app though. It brings a better experience than most paid alternatives (Netflix, Prime Video, ...)
