If it's spoofing them, its going to be more effort than it's worth to actually detect that client. I strongly recommend you to delete this post or you're gonna cause a massive Streissand Effect
Seems to be a good app if you pair it with Real Debrid. Good UI, good platform support, very popular. I just don't want it wasting my seeding bandwidth.
This client is already extremely popular. Before the spoofing update, it's mis-identified as TorrentStorm 0.0.0.8 in qBittorrent. It makes up half the peers on a lot of my torrents. Have you checked?
Does this really bother folks that much? I've never cared much about this kind of leeching as long as it isn't dominating my personal bandwidth. And it never has so far, though I have to admit my 4ish tb of movies isn't exactly high demand stuff, so I don't usually have more than one or two at a time being leeched.
Hell, I don't really care much about leeches anyway, as long as the overall ability to find things is still there. I look at it as the price of the freedom of torrents. There's always going to be higher demand for data than there are people with the resources/time/willingness to seed heavily. I'm okay with that because I don't really want to have to keep and seed every fucking thing out there, it would take much more storage than I can afford to be able to keep a ratio on most private trackers since I tend not to keep shit I don't intend to watch at least once a year unless it's something pretty damn obscure.
It does dominate my personal bandwidth. You'll notice if one of your torrents is on their app. You'll be uploading all day and it'll fill half your peers list.
As someone that uses stremio quite a lot thats sad but understandable to hear.
I do try to make up for my leeching habbits by keeping every normal torrent seeding indefinitely.
Torrents are people sharing files with each other, uploading and downloading. Stremio downloads, but never uploads. And now it doesn't want you to know who's using it, because people kept banning it.
Torrenting is a technology where a network of ordinary people share a file in tiny pieces all together. There's no central server, you connect to one, ten, or a hundred other computers who each give you part of the file.
Torrenting only works if people are uploading the file as well as downloading it. Giving a file to others is called seeding, and taking a file from others without giving back is called leeching. Most people are peers, who take the same amount they give. Ideally, everyone would be a peer, but since some people are leeches, we also need seeders.
I'm not familiar with this stremio app, but if it does what I think it does, then it takes from the network without giving back and it can now pretend to be a different client to sneak onto the network. If enough stremio users watch a show, it'll become unavailable to other pirates.
Not 100%, stremio is a front end for a debrid service and the debrid service will download the torrent and add it to their cache and stremio users will access the downloaded file directly from the debrid services' servers.
Only the initially download may cause a slow down of torrents. Idk exactly how they distribute the file to their cdn. If all the servers in their cdn download the same file at 1 time it may cause a temporary slow down of torrents but i would assume they don't download directly on each server and instead download on some close to the requesting user and then use some kind of file synchronization technique to propogate the file through the network.
Their cache is pretty huge and for most shows they already have tons of links cached and wouldn't need to keep downloading very often.
Stremio isn't the first front end for these services and like all the rest of them it will eventually get shutdown too and this will continue long after stremio.
The real.issuein my opinion isnt bandwidth hogging by debrid services its that if everyone migrates to them that the majority of the network will be leechers. With less seeders the remaining seeders will need more powerful computers to support the torrents and if they cant afford the upgrade them the whole system could collapse
Not 100% on the terminology. Peers are everyone connected. Seeders have 100% of the file, and leechers don't. Leechers can be someone who stopped halfway and uploads the half they have, or someone who is still downloading, or someone who actually leeches.
Ok... I like the interface of StremIO, which looks like a service aggregator (ie I can open the movie on a streaming service i have access to), but I don't like the fact that I can't pre-download and seed less popular files.
It supports debrid services, but from the technical description, thesec seems to be leech-equivalent to seedboxes...
What would be a good drop -in replacement? Something that works on google TVs and is easy to maintain?
If you use a debrid service, you're okay because the debrid service just downloads the file once and caches it for everyone, and you pay for the bandwidth to download from them. That isn't excessive leeching, whether they seed or not.
From my early torrent days, we used to say that any torrent we dont seed back to at rast 1:1 is bad for the network (leeching). I can see why there is a desire to block StremIO clients, but if it was modified to see back to some ratio, it would be nicer.
As for debrid, it's a bit too "centralised" for me still... I've read that it's a major weak point in the system and that servers are often unavailable. That's why i like the resilience of torrents. (Plus the sharing aspect. Sharing is caring!)
I've heard there are (more expensive) debris services that seed back, but I haven't researched it. I'd already paid for Real Debrid when I read that and it hasn't come up for renewal yet.
I could never get it to work well, every movie I tried would only play for a few seconds then buffer, then just become unplayable, on very good Internet.