Stremio OS Is Now Available for Raspberry Pi 5 and 4
142 points by commoner 11 months ago | 81 comments- nilsherzig 11 months agoStremio 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.
- Saris 11 months ago>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.
- Ajedi32 11 months agoI 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.
- Saris 11 months agoTrue, 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.
- Shinolove 11 months agodepends 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
- Saris 11 months ago
- jmprspret 11 months agoI agree. This is more contribution than leechers who download the torrent then just never seed any of it at all.
- Ajedi32 11 months ago
- mooncakes_ooohh 11 months agoThe more reliable way of using Stremio is through real-debrid anyway - meaning the torrents are cached on a server for direct streaming.
- nadanke 11 months agoit'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.
- jampekka 11 months agoI selfishly hope stremio+debrid doesn't come so popular as to be cracked down. It beats all streaming services hands down.
- jampekka 11 months ago
- nadanke 11 months ago
- Rinzler89 11 months ago>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.
- dtx1 11 months agoAs 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.
- RUnconcerned 11 months agoYou'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.
- throwaway290 11 months agoFor 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.
- RUnconcerned 11 months ago
- shelled 11 months ago> 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.
- Rinzler89 11 months agoJust 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.
- Rinzler89 11 months ago
- dtx1 11 months ago
- palata 11 months ago> 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.
- fckgw 11 months ago>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.
- ssl-3 11 months agoI 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.
- WithinReason 11 months agoit's more than the average video bitrate
- ssl-3 11 months ago
- myself248 11 months agoMost home internet connections don't have enough upload bandwidth to do that.
- fckgw 11 months ago
- dizhn 11 months agoIt'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.
- boffinAudio 11 months agoStremio 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' ..
- didntcheck 11 months agoYou 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
- crossroadsguy 11 months agoAt our place we cancelled Netflix, Prime etc. Even uninstalled Netflix. Stremio offers much better experience than Netflix let alone content.
- hnthx 11 months agoAsking for a friend, if you are a Stremio user, how would you easily contribute back to the network ?
- tarruda 11 months agoIt 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.
- dlock17 11 months agoIt 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.
- dlock17 11 months ago
- tarruda 11 months ago
- 2Gkashmiri 11 months agoBeen always a popcorntime guy. From literal day one of its launch
- Saris 11 months ago
- LeoPanthera 11 months agoNever 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.
- mplewis 11 months agoI do not see any ads in Stremio. I have used it for over a year.
- m463 11 months agodoes subliminal qualify as unobtrusive ? :)
- boffinAudio 11 months agoThere is no evidence that stremio uses subliminal methods.
- boffinAudio 11 months ago
- m463 11 months ago
- mplewis 11 months ago
- brunoqc 11 months ago> What is Stremio?
> Stremio is a modern media center that gives you the freedom to watch everything you want.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 11 months agoIs it a fork of something? I'm surprised it's coming out of the blue
- OJFord 11 months agoI don't know it's not, but it's been around a while, if coming out of the blue it wasn't recent.
- TaylorAlexander 11 months agoAccording to TFA it is based on Android TV. So a de-googled LineageOS version of Android TV.
- adl 11 months agoI've known and used Stremio for at least 5 years, maybe more.
- kranke155 11 months agoit's been around for a long time.
- azurenumber 11 months agoLineage Os, the android custom rom
- OJFord 11 months ago
- smcleod 11 months agoSeems to be limited to running on Android
- boffinAudio 11 months agoNo, it runs on everything.
- smcleod 11 months agoOh really! It looked like a linage build.
- smcleod 11 months ago
- boffinAudio 11 months ago
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 11 months ago
- Sparkyte 11 months agoSo 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.
- zozskuh 11 months agoSpotify 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...
- tristor 11 months agoHonestly, 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.
- Sparkyte 11 months agoExactly my thoughts! Remember the good old days when World of Warcraft used peer distribution of their installations?
- Sparkyte 11 months ago
- zozskuh 11 months ago
- schappim 11 months agoThey 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.
- dividuum 11 months agoThat’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.
- extraduder_ire 11 months agoDoes this custom lineageOS build (or android in general) use the hardware decoding features? I wouldn't be too surprised either way.
- schappim 11 months agoYou’re correct; I was thinking of H.264. The Pi 5 still has a 4Kp60 HEVC decoder.
- shrx 11 months agoDo you have any info on why they dropped support for H264 hardware decoding?
- dividuum 11 months agoThe software decoder is fast enough: See https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2145762#p2145...
- Narishma 11 months agoSo they don't have to pay the license.
- dividuum 11 months ago
- extraduder_ire 11 months ago
- dividuum 11 months ago
- alias_neo 11 months agoI 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.
- ThatPlayer 11 months agoMy 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...
- __jonas 11 months agoWhy not just use LineageOS directly?
- alias_neo 11 months agoI'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.
- ajot 11 months agoThere 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/
- ajot 11 months ago
- alias_neo 11 months ago
- ThatPlayer 11 months ago
- synicalx 11 months agoI'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.
- aw4y 11 months agoI 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.
- mavamaarten 11 months agoI 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, ...)
- piyuv 11 months agoYou 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’
- 11 months ago
- h4ch1 11 months agoUsed it for 2 weeks, shows, movies kept buffering even though it's supposed to use BitTorrent. Switched back to popcorn time, no issues since.
- roumenguha 11 months agoThe ideal setup takes advantage of Real-Debrid or other seedbox services.
- ssl-3 11 months agoThe ideal setup takes advantage of Usenet.
- phh 11 months agoUsenet is my main source, but I'm not aware of anyone implementing streaming over it? Sounds nightmarish to implement really
- phh 11 months ago
- slowmotiony 11 months ago...which somehow also lags and buffers even on a gigabit network.
- ssl-3 11 months ago
- boffinAudio 11 months agoYou can add the popcorntime plugin to stremio and get the best of both worlds.
- WithinReason 11 months agois there one?
- WithinReason 11 months ago
- spiderice 11 months agoI thought popcorn time died a while ago? Is it back?
- Sabinus 11 months agoOriginal project got targeted and shut down. Plethora of sham and community supported forks arose afterward.
- Sabinus 11 months ago
- roumenguha 11 months ago
- kkjkj 11 months ago[dead]