TikTok's Revenge
Twizzle • 1 Feb 2024 •
Recently, my choice of pirate streaming app, Stremio and the Torrentio plugin have been featured on TikTok. Quite often, when apps or websites like these get featured, they get inundated with users and either start to buckle at the seams from over-use and die, or get shut down by the FBI.
So far, only the former issue has occurred. In the evenings at times, it has not been possible to extract a list of streams to watch. Either that, or its just real slow. The poor dev who is responsible for the Torrentio add-on is probably pulling his hair out and expecting a SWAT team to kick down his door at any moment. Providing these sorts of grey-area services for free isn’t always a good thing.
Stremio is a bit like Kodi, it’s a media player that works out of the box, but to get the best pirate bounty, you need to install add-ons. Torrentio (on their servers) scrapes a preset list of torrent sites, extracting the torrent titles and the magnet links, all of which is stored in their own database. When you use the Torrentio plugin in Stremio and search for a movie to watch, you are searching the Torrentio database and it shows a list of matching torrents, complete with the movie file size, quality and the numbers of seeders and leechers. You select the one you want to watch, it starts to download the torrent in the background and starts the stream when it has buffered enough (not when it finishes the download).
I also pay for Real-Debrid, a torrent caching service that you can link into Torrentio. Instead of downloading the actual torrent file and angering your ISP, you stream an already downloaded copy of the torrent file straight from the Real-Debrid servers - at full speed with no buffering, even 4k BluRay files.
It has been the best streaming solution I have used for years.
But now I am worried that the success of the solution on TikTok will kill it off and I will have to start again from scratch.
But there you go @jasonleow, a paid, scalable torrent scraping service like Torrentio could be a project to work on, as long as you can build it into a Kodi/Stremio addon too. Either that, or set it up with an API other add-ons can pay to access.
Comments
Interesting Story from Austria, recently they increased the hard disk “tax”, an Austrian thing created by some kind of lobby to subsidize musical artists here. Because they think every storage medium is used to pirate stuff, so why not actively tax those devices.
Of course, everybody listens to pirated mp3s on their (now €30 more expensive) Nintendo Switch. /s
It is strange why IT companies still don’t stand up as NAS drives got also more expensive. Sure, I’m using the company’s’ petabyte storage to rip CDs…
@jasonleow Reddit
@phaidenbauer - sounds like a good stealth tax :)
It is, as it doesn’t show up anywhere, so people don’t even notice it most of the time.
Haha why me?
And you really are a good pirate - where do you keep finding these pirate channels?! 😁