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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[–] Vitaly@feddit.uk 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Not all formats can be played without downloading the whole file

[–] jbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I am genuinely curious what containers you are refering to. The only ones that come to mind are DVD and BD.

MKV definitely streams great, IIRC so do AVI and MP4. Almost all video torrents are in MKV with some older ones in AVI and few random MP4s here and there.

The one other issue is RAR'd releases, those can't be streamed. I honestly don't understand why people post RAR'd video as it doesn't really save space.

The other issue (perhaps a much more important one) with streaming torrents is sometimes you can't get a high enough speed to stream in real time, but that tends to be limited to more niche content (that often isn't even available via any streaming provider).

[–] relativestranger@feddit.nl 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

RARs might have been originally sourced from 'elsewhere', that place where the first rule is to not talk about it.

[–] jbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 weeks ago

Sure, but why not unpack them and share the MKV?

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de -1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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).

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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.

[–] jbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks 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 weeks ago

Hmm, having checked “Download first and last pieces first” usually fixes that. e.g. a .mp4 with its moov atom at the end of the file won't stream unless you make sure to download the last part of the file starting out. Just curious which media file type are you referring to that won't stream regardless of having the first/last pieces downloaded?

But either way OP using Stremio + torrentio won't fix that, that's just another torrent client doing a torrent stream. If it won't play mid-stream via qBittorrent it won't play mid-stream in torrentio either.