[nilsherzig]

Stremio 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]

>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]

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.

[Saris]

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.

[Shinolove]

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

[jmprspret]

I agree. This is more contribution than leechers who download the torrent then just never seed any of it at all.

[mooncakes_ooohh]

The more reliable way of using Stremio is through real-debrid anyway - meaning the torrents are cached on a server for direct streaming.

[nadanke]

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.

[jampekka]

I selfishly hope stremio+debrid doesn't come so popular as to be cracked down. It beats all streaming services hands down.

[jabroni_salad]

I learned about these keywords from a default subreddit, so bad news in that regard.

[Rinzler89]

>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]

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.

[RUnconcerned]

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.

[dtx1]

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

[throwaway290]

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.

[shelled]

> 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]

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.

[shelled]

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.

[palata]

> 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]

>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]

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.

[WithinReason]

it's more than the average video bitrate

[myself248]

Most home internet connections don't have enough upload bandwidth to do that.

[dizhn]

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.

[boffinAudio]

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' ..

[didntcheck]

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

[crossroadsguy]

At our place we cancelled Netflix, Prime etc. Even uninstalled Netflix. Stremio offers much better experience than Netflix let alone content.

[hnthx]

Asking for a friend, if you are a Stremio user, how would you easily contribute back to the network ?

[tarruda]

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.

[dlock17]

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.

[2Gkashmiri]

Been always a popcorntime guy. From literal day one of its launch