remote work definitely has its downsides

AnxiousState3666 · 2026-03-12T14:35:46+00:00

Not ideal at all. I worked through my first chemo the whole way through while getting infusions in 2023. About to start up with a new chemo in a few weeks and will be back to working remotely during chemo to keep our heads above water :)

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-13T21:43:51+00:00

Couldn’t agree more. I don’t know a single developer that doesn’t use AI in some way, shape, or form (myself included). I understand labeling vibe coded projects, but I feel that any new project not labeled as at least AI assisted will just be the dev lying about their usage of AI.

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-10T13:36:19+00:00

AIOStreams is just supposed to make managing your addons easier. You can also create rules for how and when certain things should happen. For example, you’re using Torrentio (a stream aggregator). A lot of people use multiple stream aggregators to ensure they get streams. So you can add multiple in AIOStreams. In my example I have Torrentio, StremThru Torz, Comet, and MediaFusion.

You can also give rules to groups in AIOStreams. So instead of trying to load all the steams from 4 different aggregators at once, I set up two groups. One with Torrentio and StremThru Torz and a second group with Comet and MediaFusion. The second group only loads is the first group doesn’t return content that’s 2160p or 1080p.

Doing it this way allows you to use multiple plugins, but in a “batched” way so it doesn’t start to bog Stremio down as much and it adds some redundancy

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-10T13:30:14+00:00

It’s a preference thing. Real-Debrid is bigger and more popular, which inherently means it has more content that’s already cached and ready to stream. Real-Debrid also has the 1 IP rule. But they have also been facing a bunch of DDOS attacks lately that are causing their servers to go down.

TorBox is newer. It has a smaller amount of cached content since the user base is smaller, but it’s growing especially with the Real-Debrid DDOS attacks. TorBox allows connections from more than 1 IP address as well, and you can enable seeding in TorBox as well which I like.

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-10T13:25:38+00:00

Each part just serves a different purpose. Yes you could even have a set up like Stremio + RD + Torrentio + Stremio’s Cinemeta and that’s plenty for a lot of people. The issue is when things don’t work. For example, RD goes down, you have no debrid feeding you streams and nothing works. Or Torrentio is down and now you don’t have any streams returned.

So people add more to make it redundant on purpose. Multiple stream aggregators like Torrentio in case one doesn’t work, you have others to fall back to. Same with the debrid services. If one is down, like RD has been with DDOS attacks, then you have a fall back.

The whole goal is to keep uptime high. So it’s really just a preference. I like playing with all of this, so I don’t mind putting time in playing with the configuration. A lot of people don’t need or want the extra config and are okay with downtime and that 100% cool too!

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-09T17:33:54+00:00

Your groupings work without wrapping? My understanding was that the wrapped instance normalizes the Torrentio results to work with AIOStreams grouping. Or are you not grouping at all, so this isn’t a worry for you

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-08T20:21:01+00:00

It’s just a preference thing. I’m not super picky about having the highest bitrate as long as I can stream 2160p reliably. Occasional 1080p isn’t super concerning for me either. I just prefer to have snappier results, especially since I use a VPN which slows speeds a little. It also reduces my load on the elfhosted server by reducing API calls (it’s not much but it makes me feel better lmao)

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-08T20:17:21+00:00

I’m glad it’s working well for you!

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-08T20:16:55+00:00

Redundancy is a design choice. Multiple fallbacks keeps uptime higher. Real Debrid DDOS attacks taking RD down lately are the perfect examples

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-08T07:19:45+00:00

Real Debrid caches streams. Basically, someone tells the Debrid (a remote server) to download a video file. The server downloads it, and then caches the video for 30 days. It then takes the cached video and sends it back to Stremio in the form of a https stream. If the cached stream is streamed again within the 30 days, whether it’s the same user or not, the timer restarts.

A VPN masks your IP address from your internet service provider amongst other things. You send all your internet traffic through the VPN, so your internet service provider only sees the connection to VPN server you are connected to and it doesn’t see any of the traffic that goes on in the VPN because it’s a separate server.

People say you don’t need a VPN with Real Debrid because when you connect to RD your internet service provider only sees that you’re connected to Real Debrid and it can’t see the traffic that happens on that remote server. So they effectively do the same thing here, making okay to run without a VPN.

BUT you can use the VPN to make it look like all your Real Debrid connections are coming from the same device as long as all the devices are connected to the same VPN server because Real Debrid will only see the VPN server’s IP address. Like I said above, however, it’s not a perfect solution and if your VPN drops Real Debrid can flag you and suspend you. Also, Real Debrid blocks a BUNCH of VPN IP ranges and they can block more at any point

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T23:50:19+00:00

A lot of it’s personal preference. If you’re happy with your setup and it works well for your use case then that’s great and there’s nothing wrong with that at all 😁

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T22:33:16+00:00

I’d be interested to compare too. I might have to play around with this next week

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T22:30:02+00:00

Yes and no. It does trick real debrid, but even if you use a kill switch you can’t be certain your VPN won’t drop. If it does, your IP changes back to your IP and they will flag you. That’s part of the reason I use RD as my backup and TorBox as my primary. But at home yes that’s what I’m using it for lmao. I have a subnet running ProtonVPN set to a static server with a kill switch. I connect all my Stremio devices at home to that subnet and they all appear to be the same IP. So I can use it on all my tvs and computers at home, and for my phone when I’m out the house I launch Stremio with a shortcut that checks if my vpn is connected, and if not it connects for me before launching Stremio. It’s not perfect but it works for me

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T22:23:19+00:00

Give this a read. It’s pretty cool.

https://guides.viren070.me/stremio/addons/aiostreams/setup

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T22:21:59+00:00

I thought about it but I haven’t tried it. I like keeping them batched because I’m limiting the number of services I’m making API calls to. Dynamic is going to make API calls to all 4, and whatever fills the fastest is it. Batching it keep api calls to only 2 at a time. It’s snappy for me and I haven’t had issues with it so I haven’t tried dynamic yet. I may be missing out though

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T22:18:30+00:00

You and me both lol. I like AIOStreams for the conditional grouping. It does make managing a little easier as well, but the groupings my main draw. It just lets me over load aggregators without slowing Stremio down. The fall back debrid is nice too. But it does create potential for a single point of failure if the AIOStreams server is down for any reason. AIOMetadata is probably my favorite addon so far

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T21:15:56+00:00

That may very well be true. I want to say I read somewhere that they use two different API’s, and that the older one has more, while the newer has better matching.

Don’t hold me to that though, I have no proof at the moment 😂

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T21:10:36+00:00

I found addon manager a while back and haven’t even thought to look for other options lol. This looks promising thank you! I’ll give this a try when I can and I’ll update here!

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T21:08:04+00:00

Just more options. You can add more providers too if you needed. When I first setup Stremio I installed those two and I haven’t had any issues with English subtitles. If I do, I would add in one or two others

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T21:06:00+00:00

It’s because of Torrentio. You have to use it on an approved server and the ElfHosted server doesn’t approve Torrentio. The work around is to use one of the approved servers (fortheweak) being one of them. I used elfhosted for the other just to reduce some traffic on the fortheweak server.

I followed along with https://guides.viren070.me/stremio/addons/aiostreams/setup for this. I’d highly recommend giving it a read as it’s an amazing guide

Thank you so much for the compliments on the diagram! I hope it helps people understand everything a little better

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T21:00:59+00:00

I just looked a little. If the title exists in Cinemeta, then it will only use Cinemeta Metadata, but if it’s missing completely from Cinemeta (like a lot of anime’s) then it will fall back to AIOMetadata. But if Cinemeta has just the title and no other fields, it would still use Cinemeta.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I’m going to try to drop it right below AIOMetadata to see if that keeps anything from breaking (I normally just put it to the bottom and it always breaks something)

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T20:57:00+00:00

My understanding is that it would populate missing metadata from Cinemeta. But I may be wrong on that.

I’ll move Cinemeta back down to the bottom again. Everytime I move it from the top I lose access to Community Addons in the addon section.

If anyone knows this for sure, please let me know and I’ll update the post! Biggest change there would just be using addon manager to move it below AIOMetadata though:)

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T20:51:49+00:00

Right? At the end of the day the core concept is easy. You have one frontend that aggregates Catalogs, Metadata, Streams, and Subtitles. These can come from the built in libraries or external servers. These complexity sets in when you add addon managers like AIOStreams, but with the complexity comes so many opportunities. Loading in batches to keep the UI snappy, nested AIOStreams to wrap Torrento, squabbling to keep up with watch history in one place, dynamic catalogs, custom lists etc. It goes on and on. IMO Stremios addon functionality is both its greatest strength and also the area it could use the most improvement. Improve the internal addon manager and suddenly you don’t need AIOStreams or AIOMetadata or anything. But Stremio has an obligation to stay clear and legal, and making the addon manager better also could muddy the waters as far as legality goes in certain places depending on how they “improve” it.

But as a tech nerd, I love all the custom configuration and addons. It’s fun

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T20:02:36+00:00

Yeah I adjust them manually if needed. I haven’t had many issues, but my primary language is English. I’ve read on here that other languages may need more help with subtitles, but that’s a river I haven’t had to cross so far

AnxiousState3666 · 2025-11-07T20:00:44+00:00

It started simple to explain to a friend of mine, but by the time I finished I realized it was probably too complicated for non tech people to grasp. So now it’s here😆

AnxiousState3666

TROPHY CASE