Is there any alternative to Stremio? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 3 days ago by aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I find it's flakey at best. Non functional at worst. I regularly have to disconnect then reconnect my VPN to get it to work. then the torrentio plugin will just uninstall constantly. Half the time it doesn't even find any results. I'm considering going back to a home server if this stupid thing doesn't work. Anyways, any alternatives? I saw that popcorn time seems to be legit now, so that's out.

TIA.

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[-] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 days ago

There's non-streamable MP4, which have index metadata at the end of the file. For those you'd have to download the end first to be able to play anything before it. But I don't think I've stumbled upon it (not that I download any MP4 in general, as there's the superior MKV).

[-] jbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

As brickfrog mentioned, you can stream MP4 easily if you enable both sequential download and first/last piece (any torrent client worth its salt has these options).

[-] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yes, that's why qBittorrent's "Download first and last pieces first" option exists. You'll be able to stream that .mp4 with its moov atom at the end of the file as long as you download that last piece during the beginning of the download. In some ways that makes qBittorrent a better streamer for .mp4 files vs other methods.

Maybe the other commenter is referring to some other media file type that can't be streamed.

EDIT - Haven't checked but am guessing torrentio also downloads first/last pieces first otherwise it'd be a terrible torrent streamer.