Stremio is an impressive program
This post will talk about piracy. I won't provide any links or direct instructions. That said, if a mod or admin thinks there is something inappropriate about talking about that stuff, feel free to mention this in the comments and I will remove any inappropriate details as soon as I can.
Like many Latin Americans, I am a long-term pirate. I have pirated stuff with floppy disks, with CD-ROMs, through IRC, FTP, Kazaa, Napster, Soulseek, websites, and torrent. I have also purchased several illegal media from street vendors. The whole idea of traditional piracy is to get the files I want for me to own, which is why I made a Plex server for myself.
Stremio is a challenge to all of this. It is much easier to setup than Plex and basically requires no maintenance. It is a program that allows me to stream video content from a variety of sources, legal or illegal. It took less than 30 minutes to set it up on my computer, and I know that it exists for both of my TVs. I am using it with the Torrentio addon.
Stremio changed my viewing habits much in the same way paid streaming services did. I am more spontaneous in my choices. I have watched Doctor Who from 2005, ER, Tiny Toons Adventures, Animaniacs, The Twighlight Zone (original), The Magicians, Blackadder, and Falling Skies (alien TV show with Noah Wyle!). Playback sometimes takes a little while to start, but went it does it rarely stutters, even on old or less popular shows. A paid debrid service should improve on that. I am now considering removing most of our extremely expensive paid streaming services and replacing them with Stremio. Money is tight and, when added up, they make quite a dent on our budget!
One bad thing about Stremio is that it is basically a leech. It does not seed the torrents. I am considering getting Real Debrid as it seemingly reduces the strain on torrents via caching.
Right now, my only concern with changing everything to Stremio is that my wife will probably dislike choosing between multiple sources for an episode, and some episodes come with bad subtitles. That would require minimal effort to solve, but might still be too much for her.
Anyway, I am very impressed by Stremio. It is so good, in fact, that I am half-jokingly worried about the police knocking on my door.
Just kidding, that doesn't happen around here.
Stremio + Torrentio + USA TV + a Real Debrid subscription (less than $5/mo) is perfect. Takes some explaining, but once it's set up it's unbeatable.
Debrid services (Real Debrid, All Debrid, Premiumize, etc.) are a grey-zone alternative to traditional piracy. Normally, you'd need to stream from a dodgy, ad-riddled 123MoviesOnline.com-style site, torrent from a public tracker (risking viruses and exposing your IP), or find your way into an exclusive premium private tracker. Debrids take a different approach: they negotiate bulk purchasing deals with a wide variety of filehosting sites (think Megaupload, Rapidgator, etc.) where scene groups upload media, mirroring the content to their own servers in a way that bypasses the site's paywalls and rate limits. They do the same for torrents, downloading the torrent file themselves on demand and then temporarily caching it for direct download. The Debrid service is protected by DMCA safe harbor provisions since they respond to takedowns and don't publicly index or curate files. And end users get safe, high-speed, high-quality direct downloads from a trusted source.
Stremio is a free front-end software that can connect to a Debrid backend. It displays movies and shows in a searchable Netflix-style format, lets you add stuff to your watchlist library, and tracks your progress, alerting you to new releases. It also has an addon system for even more functionality; for example, the Torrentio addon scrapes the web for torrent files to pass to your Debrid for rapid downloading, greatly augmenting the catalogue, and the USA TV addon shows a wide range of public livestreams of network, cable, and subscription TV.
End result: you can instantly watch virtually any movie or TV show, from any channel or platform, ranging from old silent films to in-theater releases to live television, in the highest quality (including 4K/HDR/3D), with no ads, hassle, or legal risk, for less than $5 a month.
The downside is that it takes some effort to set up -- subscribing to Real Debrid requires creating a virtual credit card via Privacy.com or Apple Wallet since regular payment processors won't touch it, and you then have to install and configure Stremio and its add-ons (which can be a bit tricky depending on how hackable your smart TV or streaming device is). But it's 100% worth it.
I'm curious about the truth of the stated "no legal risk". What exactly is protecting you, especially if you know you're pirating? Obviously other than being in a jurisdiction that just doesn't care, like OP is. The addition of add-ons like Torrentio and being blocked by payment processors seems like it makes it even more obvious that it is being used to intentionally violate copyright.
What I suppose I'm really asking is if there's no risk, or if the risk is there but just lessened due both not keeping a local copy of the files and hiding away what you're streaming from your ISP? The pattern you described doesn't sound like it would actually be legal, maybe just convoluted enough to get away with? Maybe each individual company isn't breaking the law, but presumably the end user is when they combine them?
It's similar to watching a music video or movie clip that's been uploaded to YouTube without permission. The platform isn't liable as long as it's user-uploaded content responsive to takedown requests, and it's not illegal to watch such material. Even antipiracy groups admit it's a legal gray area at best.
Pirating media has occasionally gotten viewers busted in the past, but only by torrenting, which requires the user to both download and redistribute copyrighted files and in a way that exposes their identity. Stremio et al, on the other hand, only offer direct downloads of temporarily cached content, banking on the safe harbor provisions protecting the hosting platforms.
My hesitation with Real Debrid and similar services is that you’re tying your payment info and identity directly to them. If they keep logs, and I assume they do to some extent, then they’d have a record of what was accessed, which could potentially be handed over if they were ever subpoenaed. I know that hasn’t happened yet, but the idea of that spooks me a bit more than just torrenting behind a solid no-log VPN. Am I off base in thinking that’s a bigger risk?
There's nothing currently illegal about debrids, they operate under safe harbor protections and using them doesn't involve re-distributing content to others, as with torrents. It's like being worried you might get personally sued because you knowingly looked up copyrighted content on YouTube that wasn't posted by an authorized account.
That said, legal regimes could always change in the future. If you're super cautious, you can always use a pseudonym when creating the Privacy.com virtual card (or even use prepaid card or bitcoin if you'd like), a throwaway email when signing up, and a VPN when streaming. But RD has been around for 10+ years and users have never come under legal threat.
Using Real Debrid to watch movies is illegal. It's not enforced, but the user is acquiring a copy of a movie illegally. The industry used to pursue cases against people for damages based on number of sales potentially lost due to their piracy. With torrents, they counted upload activity as being multiple copies. With downloads, it could only be 1. Because of that, it didn't make much sense for the industry to go after people who download using MEGA versus people using torrents. But that doesn't mean it's not illegal. They can absolutely come after you if they had the economic incentive to.
Ignoring for a moment how technology works generally, it is definitively not illegal to consume content that was created in violation of copyright. Speaking from the US standpoint (and we drive most of the IP law), the legal ability being extended to the original authors/publishers is the exclusive right to make copies of the work. It does not extend to stopping others from consuming illegally copied work.
Where it gets tricky is that anyone can sue anybody in the US for any reason whether it's valid or not (when it's not valid it just gets dismissed by the court, but most people wouldn't want to deal with that hassle and expense of getting to that point).
But specific to streaming services, this is already a matter of case law. MGM v. Grokster found that the pirating service is liable, not the viewer/user.
Ignoring how technology works is ignoring the entire premise.. I did not say that consuming media is illegal, but that using RD to consume media is illegal. The difference is that in the use of RD, the illegal bit is the copying of copyrighted content.
I read the summary of MGM v. Grokster and the conclusion there is that services facilitating infringement can be held liable but I don't see how that means that the viewer/user can't be held liable. If the majority opinion there actually says the latter, then sure, but from the summary it's not saying what you're implying.
Sorry if that was unclear, Grokster case is specifically that RD is likely culpable if they are advertising themselves as a copyright workaround. Jordan has mentioned same harbor earlier, that particular case is what would address their liability.
For the user, though, it's still about the consumption vs. the copying. With a torrent someone is peering and seeding, both of which are distributing the illegally copied material. If RD is consumption only, they wouldn't be doing either. Precedences there would be 17 U.S.C. § 106 (making a copy in RAM) and probably more importantly to streaming the Cartoon Network v. CSC ("Cablevision 1," data copied by functions of a DVR isn't a violating copy) and Fox v. Cablevision ("Cablevision 2, electric boogaloo," now with streaming included).
Linking sources is cool, but linking sources that aren't applicable is not. 17 U.S.C. § 106 clearly is referring to making copies of data that you had the legal right to if the use of that data necessitated copies. Given we're talking about pirated copies, this does not apply whatsoever. It's not precedence.
In Cartoon Network v Cablevision, the court answered three main questions, two of which are pertinent to this discussion. The first is whether data copied into a buffer lasting 1.2 seconds counts as infringement or not. The court found that it doesn't. However, the case clearly states that the data goes from the buffer into a hard drive. A full copy was made. That was not in dispute. It's only whether the buffer copy made prior to the hard drive copy counted as infringement.
And if you try to make the argument that the buffer being temporary is applicable here, don't. The buffer with Cablevision was 1.2 seconds and the court found that no meaningful value could be derived from that 1.2 seconds. It's impossible to argue the same for users of RD when they're getting the full movie out of it, even if the copy is temporary. It lasts long enough for a user to have gotten a complete reproduction of the media in question.
The hard drive copy is covered by the second question, which asked: who caused the copy to be made? If Cablevision, then Cablevision is in direct infringement. The court found that the user initiating the DVR process caused the infringement. However, time shifting is an accepted right of the consumer (otherwise no DVR could exist). So since it's the user that caused the time shifted copy to exist, it's not a copyright infringement problem after all.
But this has nothing to do with users using RD. Users using RD are not time shifting media; they're just watching any media they want. It's irrelevant.
I didn't bother reading Fox v Cablevision after finding the first two of your sources lacking. Reading and fact checking is time consuming and draining. I re-read the statute you linked just to see if maybe I'm missing something, but the very first sentence contains:
And the keyword is "owner". Like that automatically should have rang alarm bells that this is not applicable to the situation. Are you reading any of this before you make me read it?
You're welcome to find them unsatisfactory, but they're still the parts of copyright law and legal precedences that get referenced. It's great to analyze them directly, but it's equally important to appreciate how they are used in other cases. They're revenant when SCOTUS discusses them to decide the date of Aereo, not because I say they are.
If you've got cases where "viewerright" is litigated, I'm certainly interested. Every case I've ever seen is focused on the technicalities around what constitutes a copy, who is the responsible party for having made the copy, what is the act of displaying, public/private performance, etc.
I have no desire to continue a conversation where you clearly didn't even read the sources you linked. The first one is 100% not related. The second source doesn't say what you think it does. The third source, we'll never know since I'm not bothering to read something if you have a poor track record.
Why don't you tell me why you think your sources apply? While actually using the sources and citing.
Tempted to believe that those were just “gipitty” answers. I just fail to understand how some people cannot differentiate between legally purchasing something(and making copies as backup) and downloading something you never owned for free.
Not sure if they do it on purpose or they actually believe that.
Same way watching a film clip or a lyric video for a song is a copyright violation; doesn't mean you should be wary to register a YT account.
Doesn’t work that way. Records labels get compensated for any view you do on their content, google pays them of that wasn’t the case they would probably close YouTube. That’s why “copyright strikes” exist in YouTube that’s why content creators just don’t use any music from artist that don’t allow it in their videos.
Getting content(movies, shows, and whatever) that is being commercialized without permission and without paying its just illegal, but as the other user said it’s just not highly enforced, no one is going to swat your place because you are watching a movie illegally, some countries have the isp blocking or banning you but that’s about it.
RD complies with takedown notices by removing media from their cache. Users nearly always are streaming/downloading from the cache. It's really a very similar situation to YouTube
It’s not. How much RD compensates the creators of such materials? Does not matter if they comply or not, if it’s a cache or not. What matters it’s the source’s origin
It is. DMCA safe harbor and similar national laws protect platforms that accept user-uploaded content by exempting them from liability as long as they respond to takedowns requests and don't advertise themselves as a place to violate copyright.
The site is legally safe because of that. Still, they don’t have the licenses to have that content, probably the people uploading the content neither. What makes this “illegal” it’s not that they have the content, what makes it illegal it’s simply because they have and provide access to content they didn’t get a license to store and distribute whatever medium they use. This is not a call to stop pirating it’s just to don’t pretend this is “legal” because it isn’t.
I mean in some cases, you are breaking some TOS for keeping a backup from a movie you bought, but fuck that, that is fine by me, even downloading stuff is fine, just stop pretending that it’s something that is somewhat allowed because of some technicality that don’t apply here.
I just pirate stuff because a few reasons, don’t have the money and I cannot get a product legally in my country and I’m not going to pretend that is “legal” or “ethical” or whatever
Isn't streaming still considered a grey area since the files are only temporarily stored on the user's system, or has that changed?
That has always been illegal afaik since streaming is technically downloading with auto deletion. Just cause it's temporarily stored doesn't mean it's not stored, and logically that makes sense. Otherwise we could do an end run around all copyright laws.
Yeah, but same for watching broadcast tv. Your television set's phosphors are storing the state of the electron beam scanning across it. Granted it's only storing it for 1/60th of a second, but it's still storing it. Streaming buffers content to smooth out network jitter, but if you eliminated that buffer, it would be pretty comparable in timeframe. So unless you put a hard time limit of how much of a buffer there's allowed to be before you consider something copying versus viewing, there's not really any way to say that one is illegal while the other one isn't.
Broadcast tv is different because the copyright holders explicitly give consent for viewers to watch the broadcast. Computers streaming content illegally are almost never holding a buffer of just 1/60. They hold large chunks or even the entire file.
My point isn't to say that broadcast tv and illegal streaming are in the same category. It's to say that any technical method to view visual content will involve some form of storage, so saying that "storage is illegal, viewing isn't" isn't possible unless you clearly define how long an image can be stored before it's considered storage rather than viewing.
Why can't it be possible? There exist legal chains where the copyright holders confers the right to reproduce/copy for the purpose of transmitting the information to the viewer. From the copyright holder to the server to the ISP to the user's streaming box, etc, the copyright holders explicitly give permission for those in the chain to store the material in a buffer.
It's illegal when someone stores in a buffer outside of that which is allowed by the copyright holder. Clearly the existence of a license to store in storage can exist; we've been transmitting media this way for decades now with no issue. Again, it's only an issue when someone copies data in an unauthorized way.
Ok, but what does "stores in a buffer" mean? Does that mean that watching an IP stream without buffering to disk isn't illegal? If it isn't illegal, then sure, no problem. But if the law is saying that it is illegal because of the buffer, then a definition of in what way, or for how long something needs to be buffered for in order to be considered storage.
If buffering to disk is considered storage and thus illegal, is buffering to ram also storage? If buffering to ram is storage, is the amount of time an image remains on a screen storage?
Where's the line? Because on a strictly technical sense, whenever information is transmitted, it's also being stored. It might be stored for an extremely short period of time in an extremely transient way, but it's still being stored.
Personally I wouldn't consider steaming storage, no matter how big the buffer is, because after I finish watching a stream, I no longer have a copy of that file and I can't send it to someone else.
If you're saying that steaming a pirated video file is illegal, but say, watching a pirate broadcast tv station isn't, there must be some fundemental metric that makes that the case.
Also paging @gary. Although hypotheticals are interesting to discuss, I would like to remember that most people who are pirating are okay with committing this particular illegal and potentially immoral act. So categorizing piracy as illegal or immoral is unlikely to cause a change in attitude.
Oddly enough I might feel immoral for pirating a show that's available on services I already have, as it could mean slightly lower residuals for actors and writers. However, I am presently watching shows that are not available anywhere legally for me, as well as shows from services I would never pay for. I am also in Brazil and money is tight. So I don't feel any guilt right now.
Not sure if someone is trying to convince people to stop pirating content. It’s just kinda stupid to pretend that something somewhat illegal it’s not just because other people consider that is okay. at the end of the day, people have their reasons to pirate stuff and it’s “fine”
I think real-debrid takes anonymous payments, but regardless, you have to take some risk, whether the debrid server or the vpn. And there may be fingerprinting by trackers. Not that I personally would ever engage it such nefarious and pedestrian pursuits….
No VPN required?
Not if you use it with Real Debrid. It will either stream a cached version directly from their servers, or prompt RD to torrent the file (on their end) and let you stream the end result. Unlike Popcorn Time, Stremio doesn't function as a torrent client itself (edit: when used with RD; it will stream torrents without it)
Once you start pirating, it’s hard to ever go back to streaming services. I’ve been running a traditional Jellyfin instance for well over half a year now, and I’ve not once considered going back to Max, Hulu, or any of those services since—not that they offer any incentive to want to go back, anyway, no thanks to password sharing crackdowns and price increases because “fuck you, that’s why”.
Once your wife starts getting the hang of it, I’m sure she’ll find it more convenient than pulling up a streaming service. I mean, the idea of having everything in one place without having to look everywhere else is probably good enough to drop everything all at once… at least for me haha.
plus the fact that you need a million different services to watch everything nowadays are the reason I started pirating again. It's basically impossible to watch all the best shows that are coming out without spending $100+/month on various services... so we're just back to cable.
I really wish when you paid a monthly subscription to a service like Netflix or Hulu what you actually paid for was access to the catalog of content they provide. Being able to setup your own service (or use a third party) that aggregates the catalogs of content you subscribe to would provide a significantly better experience.
I believe that’s sorta what Hubbl (a set-top box in Australia) is claiming to do. At least, that’s the impression I got from their marketing.
Buy a Hubbl box, log in to each of your subscriptions, and see every available tv show or movie in one place. I think?
I think that's what Google TV (used to be Play Movies) tries to do, but it bothered me when I tried it. I could be wrong.
I've been using stremio with debrid for around 2 years now.
The steam wars got me so pissed off with having to have at least 5 different subs just to watch stuff I was interested in that I decided "fuck you" and went all in.
My partner and I have been maybe 80 percent totally bought in. It does almost everything perfectly:
However there are negatives, especially for foreign language:
I'd recommend it honestly. That said if someone offered me like some streaming platform bundle which hooked into tract, I'd change in a heart beat. But it doesn't, so fuck me I guess!
I see. Me and my wife only use subtitles in English, so I think it would be better on the subtitle front!
Is this basically what PopcornTime was back in the day?
Popcorn Time still exists!
Yes I think my setup is basically the same thing. But Stremio can have other sources other than torrents. Maybe Stremio is a better program with the addons, the UI, and the support for multiple devices. But I wouldn't know.
I feel like I’d like a combination of streaming but also archiving the media to a local library. Can stremio or any related (debrid-based) tool be configured for that purpose?
Looks like if you let Stremio cache the files on your device, you can keep them for offline viewing; however, you'd probably be better off setting up something like Jellyfin or Plex with an *arr stack if you want both streaming and a local library of media files.
For a good decade and a half, I was happy paying to stream content and felt like it was fair all around. But as we all knew would happen, once the new services were entrenched they started pushing boundaries with ads, price increases, and other ways of decreasing their value. I also despise "the algorithm". As a parent, I can't simply look for something to watch with my little one. Every screen's real estate is fully dedicated to pushing content and training my family on how to consume media (always and often, forever).
It's a service that I pay for but it treats me like prey. And that in turn makes me feel dirty giving them my money.
Piracy carries the additional benefit of not giving any money to US corps (and along those, some of the less deserving).
Do Debrid services normally only cache bitstarved files to save on bandwidth or is it common to find a good BD encode/remux (or untouched WEB-DLs that filter down from private trackers)? Are there services focused on quality content curation the same way that top private trackers are?
I don't use Stremio, but I use Real Debrid with Syncler. They cache literally everything downloaded, as far as I can tell, then I'm sure they release it from storage after some period of 0 activity. So I'm routinely watching UHD/DolbyVision/DTS BD remuxes (or what I assume are remuxes from streaming services in the case of streaming shows). It's pretty amazing seeing a UHD movie in DolbyVision without the hidden compression used by streaming services for bandwidth management!
So is Stremio like an all-in-one version of the *rr suite?
It streams directly from different sources, doesn’t really store anything locally
It has a cache which I assume makes things faster for videos you played at least once.
I haven't done this but it is possible to add your local files to Stremio. I think that is just for convenience, so you can access all your media in the same program.
It is not an all-in-one suite because it is dedicated to streaming. I haven't explored its addons, but I bet there are addons for all the things that can be streamed.
Game theory wise, wouldn't it be better to just seed the torrents? It's better than using a service that caches and reduces the strain on the torrent. Torrents won't exist at all if nobody seeds them.
What get's me above all is that both stremio and real debrid have commercial entities behind them and require you to make an account.
Stremio + torrentio without real debric will acts as a torrent client but one with very few options (like binding to a specific network adapter). From what I found at least part of the stremio desktop client source is available on github. But I am not really confident that there really isn't any metric gathering shenigans going on.
Torrentio itself is another bit of the puzzle that isn't entirely transparant as far as I am concerned. The website basically tells you how to load the addon but not how it works, if the source is available, etc. To be clear I get what it does functionally, I am talking about how it achieves that technically.
I also couldn't help but notice that in the configuration screen it allows you to select a bunch of trackers that have gone the way of the dodo.
Overall I feel like you are placing a lot of trust into a chain of opaque solutions in order to pirate content.
I get that the whole setup is really user friendly once setup, providing a netflix like interface and all that. So I get that part of the appeal, somewhat.
And movies in their current incarnation wouldn't exist if everyone used Real Debrid. This kind of thing only continues to exist as it is if it never reaches a critical mass of people using it, so I'm befuddled why so many people here keep promoting it. It's not good for users of it and it's not good for workers in the entertainment industry. I can understand if one can't afford media, so I don't pass judgement there, but I thought the understanding was to keep quiet about the good stuff.
Pirate cheap (not in budget but in taste) and low quality (not in production but in substance) movies and shows to contribute in their downfall. It’s one kind of activism imo. Go to cinema/buy blu-rays for actual good stuff. I may be a pirate but I’m going to see Dune 3 and The Odyssey in cinema.
I am not sure what you mean by game theory, but Real Debrid only caches the torrent once and then serves you directly so you are not leeching.
They rely on the existence of the torrent, since they download it - from other users. But they aren't distributing it to other users in that ecossystem. If everyone likewise failed to seed the torrent, the torrent would not be available to them or anyone else. In that sense, you are not leeching, but they are?
Sure. Ideally, they should seed. But at least they only download the file once, it's not like every time someone watches that video the original torrent is leeched again. I reckon this is better than using Stremio without Debrid, since in that case, I would both download from the torrent and not seed, while with Debrid I do not download and do not seed. What I don't understand is the part about game theory, probably because I know very little about game theory.
My setup involves a seedbox from a certain company I wouldn't name here in public (of course). For 10€/mo I get 4TB of space and 10TB of bandwidth for torrents. It comes with several apps available/installed and if you're comfortable with SSH, it's trivial to connect and install/uninstall the dozenish apps they have supported.
I use qbittorrent because I can have my browser open magnet links right in the remote instance. And I use Emby because I couldn't get jellyfin working - well, for Emby I had to run a command in SSH to find the port, but once I did that, it is working beautifully in the browser and in the android app.
I used to torrent, then download to a local plex server, but that's also $5/mo to watch anything on mobile. And while I'm okay with supporting people with my limited budget, free is better.
So I used to open magnet links, for anything decently popular it'd be done pretty quickly, download via FTP and have it in Plex. Now it's even easier. Open the magnet link, make sure i pick which category to save to (e.g. TV, Movies), and I have Emby set up to look in those folders so when the torrent finishes - and they have a BIG pipe so unless it's a low-seed torrent, it's usually done amazingly quick - and I can just about immediately stream the damn thing. lol.
I even managed to add something from my phone, although it was a bit finicky - torrent sites often have popups and crap that's harder to filter on mobile, and the qbittorrent interface was in sections - some sections you couldn't drag the screen around, so you had to make sure those sections didn't take up the entire viewport or you'd be "stuck" and unable to scroll and have to refresh the page. lol. It's a desktop-first design, not for mobile. But I managed. heh.
The 1TB account with these guys is 6,50€ and I recommend them.
My only issue is that with an actual bandwidth limit (whic Emby streaming doesn't count toward), I do have to limit seeding. But 10TB is a lot. I'm trying to find the balance. I'm still so so close to minimal usage... I started with 2x, now I'm up to 4x, and soon I will allow 10x as I'm using so little of the resources. But the grandfathered second account I ahve, which has less space (200GB IIRC) and not the built-in apps - has unlimited bandwidth, so I keep a few things over there so I can seed indefinitely. :)
I would recommend sonarr and radarr. After some setup overhead, they really make the experience better. Mobile friendly too.
You can think of them as independent movie and tv show "wishlists" that can interact with your download client. So a common flow is: open radarr for movies (or sonarr for tv). Search a movie. Find it. Add it. Press "manual search". Choose the torrent based on quality, size, peer count, etc. Radarr sends the movie to qbittorrent and reports on progress. When done, it's moved to your Movies folder and smartly renamed automatically with a hardlink, so doesn't disrupt your seeding.
You want prowlarr as well for searching torrents, and there's others like unpackrr for auto extracting and bazarr for subtitles. It can go deep haha. But it's really great once it's all set up.
do these -arr search tools work with other torrent clients? My preference is for Tixati, but finding magnet links myself has been a bit of a struggle.
Yes, you configure the download client to your liking. Not familiar with tixati but you can probably use it with them
Just tried it out on Android. For reference, I live in the Netherlands. The torrentio addon seems to be blocked here. It doesn't show up in the add-on list. Their website says that may be the cause and to use a VPN (didn't try to VPN yet).
The USA TV addon seemed to work alright, although it was slow to load and frequently showed the loading spinner after a few min. Not a great experience.
Without torrentio, seems like none of the movies/tv shows work at all. Just says "no streams found".
What platform is best? Android TV? Windows?
First impression for me... Not particularly useful, but perhaps I didn't set it up correctly.
Should work if you configure Torrentio on their website, copy the link, and then manually add it to Stremio.
Yeah, used the link the other user sent. It works much better with Torrentio installed. Thanks!
For Torrentio, try this guide. I'd also strongly recommend getting a Real Debrid subscription to power it.
Thanks for the link! Works much better with Torrentio added.
NP! Though note that if you only use Torrentio, Stremio will stream the torrent using a built-in torrent client, exposing your IP (if you don't have a VPN). That's why I recommend combining with Real Debrid -- you still see the broad torrent catalog scraped by Torrentio, but each result will either directly stream a cached copy from RD (labeled "RD+"), or pass the torrent to RD to torrent on their end and then directly stream you a copy once its done ("RD download"). Faster and much less risky than torrenting yourself.
Real Debrid is a game changer
Real Debrid is a paid service that, among other things, caches torrents and allows me to stream directly from them instead of torrents from inside Stremio+Torrentio. I was unsure exactly how well it would work but I subscribed for it anyway. It is so much better than I expected. I thought I would have to direct it to cache a lot of stuff manually, but that is not the case at all. Real Debrid caches way more than the obvious and popular. I just checked for the most obscure stuff in my library. Besides recent stuff, it has 2005 Doctor Who, the original Twilight Zone, obscure film noir from the 1940s, and Night Gallery (Rod Serling's TV show from the 1970s). I can't seem to find anything that has not already been cached. Granted, my tastes are not remarkable or original, but the reality is that Real Debrid doesn't seem to remove anything once it is cached. The videos play instantly, faster than some paid streaming services, and without hiccups. With the advantage of having everything in the same app, requiring minimal configuration when compared to Plex and Jellifyin. I don't believe I have any reason to pay for traditional streaming services ever again.
I set this up a few days ago; it is impressively simple and fast, but I found even having to select a file every time an entry is first watched to be too much friction to replace the PleX setup for my family members. Searching for a series on the Android TV app is also quite a poor experience; it failed to find a lot of recent anime for me and the navigation just isn't nearly as fluid as PleX+Overseerr. Might anyone who's set this up for tech-illiterate family have recommendations on how to reduce friction from the out-of-box experience?
Being fairly technical myself, I loosely referenced this and retrofitted RealDebrid into my Overseerr+PleX setup using pd_zurg and Jackett/FlareSolverr so that my users didn't have to learn an entirely new frontend. I also proxy all debrid store/API traffic through a Mullvad tunnel using wireproxy and stremthru, allowing me to a) use it on a banned hosting provider and b) multiplex my single $3/mo subscription without single-concurrent-IP limitations.
Yesterday I replaced 20TiB with identical (or untouched remux) files cached on the debrid and downgraded to the lowest storage instance on my provider with gigabit speeds. Overseerr requests are now automatically approved due to the lack of space concerns and users can see their requests on PleX within seconds. I've also let them know that they can now add content from within PleX simply by subscribing it to their watchlist, which is very neat.
I just sort by seeders personally. Choosing the first file works 99% of the time for me.
I also don't use Plex though. I still have jellyfin for local content, but I almost never use it anymore. The official stremio android app is great and user friendly for both me and my fiance.
I've heard of similar tools in the past and have always been a bit confused on their exact functionality. Maybe someone here can enlighten me:
I can see the appeal of "media piracy, but you don't have to worry about the details", but the details have always seemed rather important.
It is a single application. I don't know how the program works internally, but it has all the shows already with the metadata and it knows which files to pull for each episode. There's a page for each show, with show description, cover images, episode list with thumbnails etc. Up until now that was all automatic and I only had to search for the shows. No other setup is required. In practice, it works similarly to a paid streaming service. Note: I use the addon Torrentio. I don't know which functions are native to Stremio and which are provided by Torrentio.
I think Torrentio manages all the things related to torrent trackers.
I don't need to know any details to use Stremio. I know how to use torrents but that knowledge was not required.
I don't if that is what scarecrw meant, but my concern with torrents is always the trustworthiness of the torrent. However since we're just talking about media, the biggest risk is getting the wrong show, bad quality, or bad metadata.
That said, do folks here find that the metadata is usually accurate, and the quality is usually high?
Yes. Malicious torrents have a way of filtering themselves because if it isn't taken down, it'll just lose seeders and another legitimate torrent will take its place. Quality is often higher than streaming services provide, since those services often silently reduce bitrate.
I've found the metadata to be accurate about 98% of the time. Occasionally you'll get a mixup where it pulls the wrong show that has an identical name, or it'll pull S01E01 instead of S03E01 for example (though that typically only happens when the episode is new enough that it hasn't been ripped yet, like it aired the same night). Annoying when it happens, but rare enough that you won't really notice it.
The quality for me has always been 4k for anything that is available in 4k. Buffering is extremely rare if you have a decently fast Internet connection because the shows are cached by the debrid service before reaching Stremio. Very old shows (pre-2000) will be lower quality just because a higher-quality version doesn't exist.
N-thing the Stremio + Torrentio + debrid recommendation, which I switched to around this time last year and turned off my subscription services (and at the time I had literally all of them). Completely changed the game for TV and movies in my household. I bought an NVIDIA Shield to connect to the TV to run Stremio in the living room, and also have Stremio on all of my devices.
I'm saving at least $1000 a year and more shows and movies are available, all through a single interface available on every OS I have. The UX is simple and easy to use, and superior to bouncing between 7 different streaming services trying to find something to watch. I didn't know about the USA TV extension but I'm going to look into it today because it would cut my Internet bill by at least 30% if I kill my cable TV package.
Depending on your individual setup, getting it all working can potentially be a bit of a lift, but for what it's worth it took me well under an hour to create a Stremio account, sign up for the debrid service, install the software on my Shield, PC, tablet, and phone, and start streaming. I followed a step-by-step guide and it was incredibly easy with no hiccups.
I used to pay for all of the services, and for a while was happy to when they were better. Now they're all awful and just getting more expensive. As Lord Gaben hath said, piracy is a service issue, and right now pirating is flat-out a better customer experience than the current state of streaming, and only costing me $3/mo for the debrid service.
I've been out of the loop for streaming/downloading media for a few years, because the services actually worked fairly well for the most part, and then it got worse and worse and worse. I downloaded Stremio, having never heard of it before your post, and after downloading one single AddOn, I think I'm satisfied again and will go back into my ground squirrel hole for another few years at least.
Old thread, but wanted to chime in anyway that I didn't bother with Debrid or virtual credit card or anything other than just Stremio and one single AddOn. For folks who don't feel very techie, it's that easy, I'd be happy to walk you through if you PM.
Just be aware that without RD, Stremio functions as a torrent client, meaning it both uploads content to peers in the torrent swarm and exposes your IP address to anyone in it (if you don't have a VPN). This is much more clearly illegal and people can and have been busted for torrenting in the past, either by their ISP issuing a warning/cutting service or the media owner suing them directly.
I have a question off the topic, but still relevant. I see a lot of people here recommend using Real Debrid, but do you think it is still reliable considering their recent piracy policy change? If not, what do you choose as alternative?
I've seen Premiumize often. I don't know how well it works, but I assume it's similar.
I subscribed a few months after that, and it seems to work fine despite the dire headlines. Apparently they had to drop some partnerships, take down some API endpoints, and remove specific files, but in my experience it works great.
I was using it both before and after whatever debacle happened. It was down for a few days during that, but otherwise, I haven't noticed a difference. Works great!
Don’t have much to add, except that bit about needing choose sources per-episode reminds me a lot of having to download N copies of stuff on LimeWire to get one acceptable copy, with encoder gitches, mislabeled bitrates, re-re-re-re-encoded files, etc being abundant. Stumbling upon torrents in the early 00s was amazing, suddenly I could download whole albums and seasons and such with a single consistent quality, and of course that only got better after finding some private trackers a few years later.
I assume that Stremio relies on public torrents? I see the comments talking about debrid services caching, but if there’s any chance I would show up as a peer on a public torrent that’d make me reluctant to use it. To my knowledge it’s exclusively public tracker users that get hit with fines and such.
If properly configured with Torrentio and a Real Debrid subscription, Stremio will only show either files that are already cached by RD ("RD+"), or uncached torrents that, when selected, will prompt RD to torrent it on their end and then stream it directly to you from their servers when finished ("RD Download").
If you use real-debrid you are not using Torrents at all.
Anyone have experience getting this kind of backend watchable on Roku streaming devices? Is that even possible? That's what I got plugged into all my TVs already, and I've been looking for a way to get off several streaming services that we hardly watch, but my wife won't accept anything that involves screen mirroring (or really any change in the convenience of being able to just turn on a TV and use a remote to watch stuff).
No, doesn't work on Roku. But, you can get a chromecast. Assuming your tv is relatively recent, you can use the chromecast remote to turn on the tv, and it will detect the chromecast as the input to switch to, and you use the chromecast remote for everything. Really the only downside is the extra few seconds it takes the tv to recognize the chromecast input to switch to.