I’ve been a good boy for 5 years or so but the seas call to me. Are streaming sites the way to go now or is torrenting still a better bet for mainstream movies and tv? I’d imagine all of my accounts have been deleted on those sites so I’d be starting over.
Kodi + add-ons is great if you like tinkering, otherwise I would recommend Stremio with the Torrentio add-on. Stremio + Torrentio + Real-Debrid is the easiest way to consume pirated media IMO.
I’ve heard good things about Stremio + Torrentio. Does it have trakt integration or similar equivalent? I think the discovery in addons that have this makes a big difference. I have many different categories to browse that might sound similar, e.g. Trending, Trending New, Most Watched, Most Popular. But each one has a specific and plainly disclosed ranking methodology and that’s very useful to avoid constantly being recommended to watch The Office, Breaking Bad, cowboy soaps etc
It has a subpar integration, if you care too much about this kind of stuff (getting a whole working multimedia center, and thinkering in general) and have a proper device that can handle Kodi in a lagless manner, I’d say you stick with it.
If you want a set it and forget it kind of solution and have less sophisticated hardware Stremio + a Debrid provider is golden.
(My Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 struggles with Kodi and a Debrid/streaming setup, also is significantly slower than Stremio).
How does a shield struggles with kodi? It’s my main setup (kodi+fen+trakt+real debrid) and I have no problem with it.
It doesn’t right away (after a fresh reboot) but it fails eventually, as Kodi is my heaviest app, it could be due to my skin, but man, some ppl say Stremio is ugly, but Kodi with stock addon is way uglier that is not even pleasen to use, my skins aren’t the heaviest, Arctic Horizon 2 and Fuse.
It also could be because the Shield TV is my secondary Plex Server and that would bring some background load (even when it is not serving media), but I have done tests with and without this, same for the PlexKodiConnect addon.
I’m mostly only using CCWGTV, both the original 4k model and the budget 1080p one. Neither have performance issues for me (except before filtering out 4k releases on the 1080p model)
I’m just aiming for the simplest/smoothest experience as possible, not so much for myself but so that I can mail it out to my mum who lives out in the bush and just tell her to enter her wifi password and open kodi. She’s able to manage from there without having to worry about hdr/dv content compatibility with her display, or default audio language/subtitle display etc.
In kodi you can edit settings.xml for IPTV Simple Client addon to point playlist items to a given category in Seren, make a playlist linking to those categories a favourite, and configure Kodi to open to the favourites menu on launch. That way she has a fully on-rails and custom experience based on her preferences from the point that she runs it.
There is also a Trakt add-on, like the other commenter said the integration isn’t as seamless as a well-maintained Kodi setup, but it’s definitely good enough that I’ve switched from Kodi to Stremio with Trakt being the way I organise my TV/movie watchlists.