Stream Everything with Stremio and Real-Debrid

Back in 2012, when Netflix introduced its service outside of the United States and a select few European counties, things were great. Netflix had a huge catalog, the convenience of having everything in one place without having to download large files, dealing with incorrect subtitles, and being able to use it anywhere was huge. Piracy plummeted, because using the paid alternative simply worked better.

Fast forward some ten years, and we find ourselves in a hugely fractured streaming landscape. We have myriad providers, each of them shuffling titles between them, with some of them even offering paid options with ads. We’re back to TV for US users, and worse for the rest of us who never had to deal with anticompetitive cable TV packages from monopoly cable companies.

Fortunately, watching movies from slightly less legal sources has also benefited greatly from the past decade in tech. What if you can have all the convenience of a paid streaming service, but for free? That’s what Stremio can offer. In this article, we’ll go over what Stremio is, how it works, and how you can set it up for yourself.

Heads up; the below is mildly technical. It is assumed you know how to use a computer at a level beyond simply sending emails and using Office. Nothing wild, though.

What is Stremio?

Simply put, Stremio is a streaming service aggregator in the form of an app. It can obtain movies, series, and what have you from a number of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc. It then enables you to search across all these services, and play them right in the Stremio app — provided you have a subscription to the service. It keeps track of what titles you’ve watched, your progress, and subtitles in many languages.

However, where it comes to life is through its plugins. These plugins enable you to use the app in the way described above, but instead of using the paid streaming services, it can grab the movie from a torrent and play it.

The finishing touch is Real-Debrid, which can act as an intermediary (and cache), and download the torrents on your behalf. It then serves you a stream for the movie directly. This way, you don’t ever have to download the movie. You just stream it directly from Real-Debrid’s servers. No hassle dealing with the storage of countless huge files, or the possible legal trouble from downloading movies. You wouldn’t download a car, either.

Sounds good? Let’s get to it then.

What you’ll need

1. Sign up for a Stremio account and download the app, preferably on a laptop or PC — don’t worry, we’ll set it up on your other devices later
2. Not strictly required — and this is a paid option — but a Real-Debrid account and a subscription to their premium plan (which is very affordable at $4 for a month) will make the whole experience ten times better
3. (Optional) a Chromecast with Google TV if your TV doesn’t have the Stremio app natively. We’ll get to this towards the end.

Plugins in Stremio

By default, Stremio sources movies from official streaming services. Obviously, that’s not what we want, so we’ll need to configure Stremio to use a torrent scraping service instead. We’ll set up two, for redundancy.

These services scrape many public torrent websites such as Kickasstorrents, Rutracker, 1337x, etc. Chances are, if what you’re looking for is available in a public torrent, Torrentio will find it.

Torrentio

Head over to the Torrentio Configuration Page. You can leave most of the options to their defaults, except if your TV or device does not support 4k. If it doesn’t — e.g. my TV is a 1080p one — you should select 4k in the exclude qualities menu:

If your device does support high resolutions, you can just leave this as-is.

The second thing to configure is your debrid provider. I recommend Real-Debrid, but honestly haven’t tried any of the others. I assume they’re perfectly fine, too. Make sure to configure your key and hit the Install button. It should open the link in the Stremio app. If it doesn’t, just copy the link behind the “Install” button and enter it into the Stremio search bar.

KnightCrawler

Same steps as before for KnightCrawler. It’s essentially a mirror of Torrentio and we’re installing it as a fallover.

Streaming Catalog

The final plugin we’ll be installing is Streaming Catalog, which has all the catalogs from the popular streaming services in one place. This is what ties the user experience together, showing the movies and series that are popular on the various services all right in Stremio:

You can remove all other plugins if you like to keep things tidy.

That’s all. Now simply search for a title, select a torrent, and you’re off. If you’ve opted to use Real-Debrid, playback is nigh instant and without interruptions. I’ve heard people make do without and there are very few hiccups, but you’re far more reliant on a good internet connection as it’ll need to download the torrent before it can play it. With RD in between, you only have to download a stream that’s a few hundred KB/s.

As an aside, you can also use RD to download any torrent, or file from a premium file sharing website such as RapidGator, Katfile, etc.

Other Devices

Earlier I mentioned the Chromecast with Google TV as an optional accessory. Reason being is that Stremio is available on Google TV, meaning you can use it to use Stremio on any TV with an HDMI port. The remote also has a built-in microphone which is useful to have Google spy on you search for titles without having to type them out on a tedious TV keyboard.

After you’ve done the above configuration once, it’s set up for your account. Meaning you can just download Stremio on any of your devices, log in, and you’re good to go. All the plugins will be configured automatically.

Of course, if your TV comes with Google TV, you can just install it directly. Currently, there isn’t a native app available for iOS devices, but you can use Stremio Web on them instead.

If you have any questions, r/piracy is the place to ask them. Thanks to Amnesiac for pretty much everything in this guide - I merely took the time to write it down.

Good luck, and have fun!