Stremio OS Is Now Available for Raspberry Pi 5 and 4
blog.stremio.comStremio is a Mediacenter thingy. You can provide different video sources using Plugins.
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.
>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.
I think a big part of the problem is that consumer internet upload speeds are often way slower than download speeds. So they might download 1 GB of data but only have time to seed 50 MB before the stream is over.
True, although most TV shows are around 10-15Mbps, so even with a pretty slow upload they should be able to seed at least what they've downloaded over the time it takes to watch it.
depends on the content length tho, I can download 1 GB of data in 100 seconds but if I am watching it for 20 minutes (which is not unreasonable at all given that torrents for 20 minute TV shows are generally around 1gigs at 1080p) I have 1200 seconds to upload that 1000 MB of data back. That's about 7Mbit upload which is not crazy at all
I agree. This is more contribution than leechers who download the torrent then just never seed any of it at all.
The more reliable way of using Stremio is through real-debrid anyway - meaning the torrents are cached on a server for direct streaming.
it's funny because, obviously, they can't really advertise this and the torrent extension, but that seems to be the main way people are actually using it. so a lot of people end up trying stremio, and then voice (valid!) criticisms that in reality just don't apply to how people actually use stremio.
I selfishly hope stremio+debrid doesn't come so popular as to be cracked down. It beats all streaming services hands down.
I learned about these keywords from a default subreddit, so bad news in that regard.
>But stremio users are only active on a given Torrent while watching its content. Meaning that they contribute nothing back to the network.
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.
As a heavy private tracker user I have found that most private trackers life and die by super seeders from seedboxes, just seeding from a home connection doesn't contribute any meaningful bandwidth and only helps you get bonus points from your tracker.
You're going to have a hard time maintaining an acceptable ratio on a non-ratioless private tracker without a seedbox or a NAS/homelab that's on 24/7. These trackers largely self-select for power users.
I'm on several and have no issues, I just seed when my computer is on but with low bandwidth. I live by long seedtimes, bonus systems and Freeleech and have easily a few terrabytes of buffer on my trackers
For obscure stuff that isn't already on Netflix etc it's often regular people... One time I was downloading something to watch with a friend and turns out it was friend seeding it. And whenever I seed I often see upload traffic.
> That's why private trackers are the best
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.
Just because you had a shitty private tracker experience doesn't mean they're all bad. Similarly just because a SO from a past relationship broke your heart an betrayed your trust, doesn't mean relationships are bad and will result in the same outcome as yours. YMMV can't be overstated. I'm sure some are toxic, but plenty are not.
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 was sharing my experience and from supposedly one of my best. This was my experience. In my experience the experience was shitty or bad as you take it. Are you sharing an empirical study on it? No, you are not.
> Keep social interaction only on social media, and trackers only for piracy, without mixing them together, and you'll be good.
In case it didn't hit home last time: it was not there that I posted or communicated and the ban was based on guess work, there was no possible way to connect the two sites - none so whatsoever. At one place there was no email shared and entirely different username. IPs, yes. And even then I was not being abusive or so. I just disagreed. No, I had not shared my account usernames or so in the past at all!
Anyway, cheers. Have fun there. Those places are actually not bad when you have the time and patience to navigate through that and also keeping the head down. Good luck.
> 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.
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.
>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.
I may be an outlier, but I have what I believe to be the cheapest plan that the singular viable ISP available to me has to offer. (It is a very large ISP.)
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.
it's more than the average video bitrate
Most home internet connections don't have enough upload bandwidth to do that.
It's actually a little bit worse in terms of seeding torrents. Stremio (and things like Kodi) shine when you combine them with a torrent caching service like real-debrid. The stream links become direct download links and no torrenting happens at all.
All the media in the world and no waiting at all. It works better than any streaming platform.
Stremio OS is a good open-ended solution to the problem of non-active torrent users. In the existing desktop client, the user only participates while watching a particular stream - but with Stremio OS, the capability for torrent participation is a lot more viable.
Watch for an update to Stremio in the near future with a toggle for 'participate in torrent sharing while not watching' ..
You mean the people going out of their way to pirate content are freeloaders who contribute nothing back, and the service they're enjoying wouldn't exist if everyone behaved like them? How unexpected
At our place we cancelled Netflix, Prime etc. Even uninstalled Netflix. Stremio offers much better experience than Netflix let alone content.
Asking for a friend, if you are a Stremio user, how would you easily contribute back to the network ?
It has been a long time since I used stremio, but IIRC it used to have a max cache size for torrent plugins. The default setting was something like 10GB, which means older torrents eventually get deleted after you stream a certain amount of other content.
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.
It would be cool if this was true, but no, Stremio does not seed cached files.
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.
Been always a popcorntime guy. From literal day one of its launch
Never heard of Streamio before, but from the FAQ:
> We run non-intrusive ads occassionally
(Their typo, not mine.)
So it's like Plex, but, with ads in it.
I do not see any ads in Stremio. I have used it for over a year.
does subliminal qualify as unobtrusive ? :)
There is no evidence that stremio uses subliminal methods.
wow it must be working really well
Hey, that ghost peering over your shoulder has a really gnarly smile.
More importantly, there's no evidence that subliminal messaging works.
> What is Stremio?
> Stremio is a modern media center that gives you the freedom to watch everything you want.
Is it a fork of something? I'm surprised it's coming out of the blue
I don't know it's not, but it's been around a while, if coming out of the blue it wasn't recent.
According to TFA it is based on Android TV. So a de-googled LineageOS version of Android TV.
I've known and used Stremio for at least 5 years, maybe more.
it's been around for a long time.
Lineage Os, the android custom rom
Seems to be limited to running on Android
No, it runs on everything.
Oh really! It looked like a linage build.
here's the downloads page for Stremio: https://www.stremio.com/downloads
So I am kind of opposed to piracy but the novel idea of a peer based CDN has its merit. Imagine an encrypted framework where Netflix operates in a peer to peer communication. It would drastically reduce the overhead a streaming service would require to send content to users. If people are all watching the similar content or opt-in to supporting the network chunks of data could stored across many customer peers to complete the mesh. This would allow high quality content with a reduced amount of latency for delivery. It is why piracy took of during the DSL/Cable era. Networks were not fast and streaming could not work that efficiently so a p2p network alievated the stress allowing viewers/listeners to grab media and be quick about it.
Spotify used to run a P2P network to serve music[1], which they seemed to have shut down in 2014[2].
[1] https://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10....
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
Honestly, this would be a great efficiency boost if you could figure out how to manage distributed access, even in the existing model. Content servers in the CDN could act like origins/seedboxes, and pieces could be streamed from other clients based on what's currently contained in their content cache or downloaded episodes bucket. I'd love to see Netflix do something like this as long as it was only for non-mobile clients (e.g. Xbox, AppleTV, et al). I don't mind sharing my upstream with others if it helps smooth delivery for myself.
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.
Exactly my thoughts! Remember the good old days when World of Warcraft used peer distribution of their installations?
They state: "While the Raspberry Pi 5 is fully capable of smooth 4K playback, Raspberry Pi 4 will not be able to play 4K content due to hardware limitations."
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.
That’s incorrect: Both have hardware support for decoding H265 up to 4K. The difference is H264: the Pi4 still has a hardware decoder (up to FullHD) while the Pi5 doesn’t and will use software decoding as it’s more than fast enough. As it is software, there’s no resolution limit.
Does this custom lineageOS build (or android in general) use the hardware decoding features? I wouldn't be too surprised either way.
You’re correct; I was thinking of H.264. The Pi 5 still has a 4Kp60 HEVC decoder.
Do you have any info on why they dropped support for H264 hardware decoding?
The software decoder is fast enough: See https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2145762#p2145...
Or they did not want to pay for the license, or for the component.
The software decoder is not fast enough if you need to use the CPUs in parallel. So removing the hardware acceleration is a net loss of compute power.
So they don't have to pay the license.
I have no interest in Streamio, but I have really wanted an Android TV OS I can run on commodity hardware for things like Netflix, YouTube et al, I wonder if this might be a suitable solution?
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.
My issue when I looked into this is that, because of DRM (yay), you cannot easily get full HD video on commodity hardware. For example those Konstakang Android TV Raspberry Pi builds will only get Widevine Level 3, which limits you to 480 or 720p on apps like Netflix.
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...
Why not just use LineageOS directly?
I'm not aware of there being an official Android TV release of Lineage, there's an unofficial one according to XDA.
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.
There are some offical Android TV builds:
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/
Thanks for the links.
The Kang one is the Pi version I spotted. The Walmart devices in assuming are US. Radxa could be decent if we get builds for the Zero3.
The Chromecast one could work but last I checked there was no unlock for the newer devices with 4K.
Ideally I want hardware I won't have to battle to keep control over (getting too old and jaded for that).
I've been using Stremio for about a year now and have been very happy with it, if I had an Rpi I'd definitely give this a try.
I already use Stremio with LineageOS on Raspberry 4, it's android so you can install a lot of apps directly from the store, stremio included.
I wish the app was open source. I have plenty of experience with android and video app development and would love to contribute some features. But alas.
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, ...)
You have everything in a single app with somewhat nice UX. If/when someone/a company is able to find a solution to the licensing problem and releases this with a good enough price point, privacy will be ‘solved’
Used it for 2 weeks, shows, movies kept buffering even though it's supposed to use BitTorrent. Switched back to popcorn time, no issues since.
The ideal setup takes advantage of Real-Debrid or other seedbox services.
The ideal setup takes advantage of Usenet.
Usenet is my main source, but I'm not aware of anyone implementing streaming over it? Sounds nightmarish to implement really
"Streaming" from Usenet doesn't sound too bad, really, for many things.
Just automagically download the RARs and PARs for a good release that make sense to get moving, and then: Get moving. (And keep processing as moving forward happens.)
(What makes a "good" release? IDK, but streaming from torrents must be able to be figured out, and outside of torrents nzbget seems to be able to usually figure it pretty quickly from Usenet for me. Neither method is inherently start-to-finish and suitable for "streaming" but that doesn't mean that either of them cannot be made to work.
And one of them apparently does work.)
...which somehow also lags and buffers even on a gigabit network.
You can add the popcorntime plugin to stremio and get the best of both worlds.
is there one?
I thought popcorn time died a while ago? Is it back?
Original project got targeted and shut down. Plethora of sham and community supported forks arose afterward.