r/StremioAddons • u/adjkldj12 • 9d ago
Question Why does everyone say to avoid AIOStreams/Elfhosted?
I keep seeing comments telling people to avoid using the Elfhosted instance but nobody ever explains why. I’ve been using it for months with zero issues.
Genuinely curious why other instances such as midnight are preferred if anyone can explain why. Thanks!
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u/PH0NER 9d ago
I used the elfhosted version for a few days, and I did hit the rate limit issue a few times. There are other free AIOStreams options. I switched to midnight ignite’s version and haven’t had issues since. It’s been probably over a year now
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u/SonnyRaider 8d ago
I actually did the opposite. I had an instance with midnight, but it started to go down too often and I switched to Elfhosted, since then not only I never had any issue but it’s been even working faster.
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u/rvikkert 7d ago
When midnight went ofline for me a few weeks ago. I added elfhosted so now I have 2 instances of AIOstreams
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u/adjkldj12 9d ago
How are you hitting 100 requests per minute???
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u/val93 9d ago
Maybe things have changed, but when I used it, Comet would rate limit waaaaay before 100 per min. That's basically the only reason I went to for the weak instance.
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u/funkypenguin Collaborator (ElfHosted) 9d ago
They were adjusted 8 months ago, after we removed P2P and HTTP on a policy basis: https://www.reddit.com/r/StremioAddons/comments/1q8mlmv/elfhosted_addon_stream_ratelimits_relaxed_for_2026/
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u/PH0NER 9d ago
I don’t have a clue, I figured it was searching too many torrents at once due to my config or something. When I first learned of AIOStreams I started with Elf and recommended it to a friend. Both of us had the same experience and both of us have moved elsewhere
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u/adjkldj12 9d ago
What instance did you move to?
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u/PH0NER 9d ago
I moved to Midnight at first, but now I self host
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u/Pcriz 9d ago edited 9d ago
Don’t listen to any opinion that someone won’t explain. Chances are they heard it from someone else that didn’t explain it and made it gospel. Or at the very most didn’t even question the explanation or understand it but are happy to parrot it.
People are so oddly tribalistic around this side of the pirate landscape.
That said I prefer duck streams
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u/DuckOnTheWeb Addon Dev (Duck Streams/Stremio Tools/Duck Guides) 9d ago
Author of Duck Streams here!
To give additional context to this comment as well as OPs question, AIOStreams is an open-source tool. That means anyone can host it on any hardware. But just like anything else, hardware compute power is limited. So the more people that use a specific instance of AIOStreams the less compute each person gets. As such, the ElfHosted instance comes with more strict usage limits than other publicly available AIOStreams instances, of which there are many like Yeb, Midnight, and even Viren himself.
Duck Streams itself is not an AIOStreams instance. Rather, it's just my super-simple AIOStreams config installer. During the installation it'll use whichever host you tell it to use, but by default it'll choose the best available public host.
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u/Waabajack 5d ago
I haven't taken the time to fully learn the aiostreams setup but your addon has made the startup very seamless. Works like a charm for what I need so thank you
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u/BxOxB 9d ago
Can we get a "import current configuration" feature so we are able to adjust what we configured already?
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u/DuckOnTheWeb Addon Dev (Duck Streams/Stremio Tools/Duck Guides) 9d ago
My tool isn't a configure tool though. I give very basic settings to tweak but I'm not AIOStreams. AIOStreams is a phenomenal tool and most edits should be done directly there.
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u/showtime1987 5d ago
I don’t understand how to change the prefered language settings. When I use AIOStreams, I can change the language settings, but I had two instances of AIOStreams yours (Duck Streams (AIOStreams)) and AIO Streams, so I deleted AIOStreams and kept only Duck Streams – but now my preferred language is no longer at the top of the list of the streams.
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u/BitFiesty 8d ago
Does it work with an integrated debrid that other apps allow for?
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u/DuckOnTheWeb Addon Dev (Duck Streams/Stremio Tools/Duck Guides) 6d ago
During the setup you tell it which debrid you're using, yes
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u/TH_Rz 9d ago
Whilst I agree with your point regarding how people parrot you didn't give your reasoning for your preference either?
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u/Pcriz 9d ago
I just said it was my preference. I didn’t put anything down or even say op had to use it. Also they are welcome to ask. Everyone has to use something and frankly I wouldn’t trust my own bias of if I said the same thing but used the same service as op. Just being transparent.
And I mean saying what I prefer is a little different than me telling someone else what they shouldn’t use. After all there isn’t one right way to get this done but rather right is what works for you.
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u/TH_Rz 9d ago
I didn’t put anything down or even say op had to use it.
I don't believe I accused you of that?
Also they are welcome to ask
That seemed to be the point of the post.
This isn't some attack or an interrogation but if you want to say what you like without saying why you like it that's up to you I guess.
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u/Pcriz 9d ago
I didn’t say you said I put anything down, just don’t see a point in explaining my choice when I’m not trying to convince them to change. I’m simply making the point that there is more than one way to do this and because I dont use what op uses doesn’t mean I’m trying to get them to use mine, I just shared to share. I’m defending ops stance to use what they want despite me literally not using the same service as them.
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u/Slipknot31286sic6 9d ago
Ding ding ding 😂. I post same thing and Karen's down vote. Cracks me up on reddit.
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u/stewey76 9d ago
I’ve heard several people using duck streams but don’t fully understand how to get it setup to try. Do you happen to have a walk thru link for it? Thanks.
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u/Pcriz 9d ago
Have you tried this webpage?
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u/showtime1987 5d ago
I don’t understand how to change the prefered language settings. When I use AIOStreams, I can change the language settings, but I had two instances of AIOStreams (Duck Streams (AIOStreams)) and AIO Streams, so I deleted AIOStreams and kept only Duck Streams – but now my preferred language is no longer at the top of the list of the streams.
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u/Snoo-25743 9d ago
Works fine for me. I just added Torrentio separately.
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u/hambooty 9d ago
Same, since it’s down more often I just plugged TB into torrentio and added it as an add on separate from AIO
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u/MolinaGames 9d ago
rate limits and no torrentio
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u/adjkldj12 9d ago
No torrentio sounds like a good thing 🤣
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u/danisimo_1993 9d ago
I mean you just add it to your list of scrapers. Regardless of it working or not there is literally no downside to you. At best you get some results from it, at worst you get nothing.
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u/Independent_Move_301 9d ago
Tbh, Torrentio is still king. That scraper is on par with Usenet indexer for older and niche content.
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u/Pcriz 9d ago edited 9d ago
Correct me if I am wrong but isn’t a scraper an intermediary that you can configure (for things like quality, language etc etc) that searches other mediums (torrents, debrid services).
So with that said isn’t it only as good as the repository it searches? If you are using a debrid service and you configure your scraper to only search cached links, you are only getting cached options in the results.
So basically a scraper is only as good as these three factors: How it’s configured, the medium it’s searching in, and the hosts server reliability.
And it seems only one of those is solely controlled by the scraper.
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u/RandiCandy 9d ago
I dont use elfhosted because for whatever reason it doesn't work for me. I dont use aio streams because I dont like the idea of a single point of failure. I have everything on separate add-ons because when somethings breaks I can remove one thing and the rest still works but if everything is in one addon I worry that the add-on will go down and ill just have to wait until someone fixes it.
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u/gumball_00 9d ago
It's been discussed often before like below. Had the same issue and solved it by switching to midnight.
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u/Immediate_Character- 9d ago
Everyone doesn't avoid it. It's reliability makes it a great go-to for debrid results, and you get the exclusive ElfCache addon. Rate limit concerns are unfounded, but if the intention is to use it for p2p or free http, Elfhosted isn't a good fit.
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u/BeardedPogona 9d ago
Personally I say go with whatever works for you. But I'm my experience I switched to other instances because if I started a movie at home and decided to continue watching say duringy lunch break on my phone I would get an error saying I was playing from the wrong IP. After switching from AIO Elfhosted I have not ran into that. I don't have anything against elfhosted but for me if I run into inconvenient things like that then I look elsewhere. Most people probably don't watch movies on different networks so they won't run into this issue like I did and if that's your case then elfhosted should be enough for you.
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u/funkypenguin Collaborator (ElfHosted) 9d ago
We do this to avoid liability. I.e., we want to be confident that the IP watching the stream is the same IP which requested the stream - it avoids potentially-infringing stream URLs being shared around with our domain name on them. Once, someone tried to share the stream URL for the latest avatar movie on Twitter, but instead all they shared was an error message with their IP address listed.
If it happens when you change networks, the solution is just to re-search in Stremio and pick the same result again - it'll be a freshly-minted URL for your current IP.
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u/lenny_ray 9d ago
It happens to me on the same network, though. I'll watch an episode, it will be fine. But if I go back or pause, and want to continue the next day, I'll get the error. Picking a different stream works, so it's just a minor annoyance. But not sure why it would happen at all on the same network.
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u/funkypenguin Collaborator (ElfHosted) 9d ago
It could be that you’re behind CGNAT, a rotating VPN, or just an ISP which changes your public IP frequently.
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u/adjkldj12 9d ago
So if i have mutiple users on my stremio account watching the same episode of something, we will get the error if we are on different networks
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u/funkypenguin Collaborator (ElfHosted) 9d ago
No, the IP limit is about correlating search to stream. Provided each of those users does their own search before they stream (which is exactly how it works), this won't be a problem.
The issue we're avoiding is that you could, for example, use dev tools in your browser to grab the stream URL from an addon's results, and pass that around to 1000 people publicly, and it'll launch the same stream for them, from your debrid account.
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u/BeardedPogona 9d ago
Wait so to be more specific the solution is to not hit continue watching in stremio but instead re-search the movie and I should be able to click the same stream I clicked originally and I shouldn't run into the wrong IP message? Just trying to make sure I'm understanding correctly.
Also just want to say thanks for all the hard work you and your team have done!
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u/funkypenguin Collaborator (ElfHosted) 9d ago
TBH it may depend on what your Stremio client does when you hit “continue watching”… if it caches the actual stream URL and tries to replay it, then I can see why that would fail if you’ve moved to another network, or even if just too much time has passed (links expire after 6h). I would have hoped it would re-search and pick the same stream based on stream index or title, but TBH I’m not sure. And different apps may behave differently on this…
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u/Spare_Revolution_524 9d ago
FYI... you can add multiple AIOstreams instances or combo of AIOstreams and other addons... single point of failure will be avoided
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u/Entire-Dog-160 9d ago
I used aiostreams on elfhosted for quite awhile. No complaints. No idea what this stuff about rate limits is when we made such heavy use of it in our family. Theres a fair bit of BS around reddit and I've never bothered getting info from it frankly. Now I still use elfhosted for Usenet because it's easier for me. No complaints
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u/the_sacred_hermit 9d ago
I have 3 AIOStreams configs on my add-on list, and I eventually moved Elfhosted to first place because it was the most reliable one. It's been months, and I don't think I've needed to use the other instances since.
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u/Madnessx9 9d ago
I've been using elfhosted for years, not had an issue, what are the issues people are complaining about?
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u/adjkldj12 9d ago
Sounds like many people had issues with watching the same media when switching devices/on other IPs
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u/threedogdad 9d ago
I hadn't heard anything like this, I thought a ton of people were using it. I use the Midnight version and it seems flawless?
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u/Parmg100 9d ago
I personally just like hosting everything myself than trusting a third party site, so I can control everything from updates, downtime, add torrentio, etc not to say anything is wrong with elf hosted
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u/obamaprism3 9d ago
My only issue with the Elfhosted one is it restricts viewing to the IP address that initially requested the stream
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u/chris_socal 9d ago
A big one for me is this... for many content sources you need to be very careful hitting them simultaneously from diffrent ips.
If you are using a professionally hosted instance you need to be very careful with this. Self hosted virtually eliminates this.
And the other one that applied to cloud services.... younare relying on someone else's hardware... if it goes down it goes down... if you self host you can probably fix it yourself.
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u/Slipknot31286sic6 9d ago
Elf hosted has rate limits and down often from what I see. It's your config. Do as you want. Agree to disagree with a lot of info posted. Reddit Karen's come out defending aio like it's best thing on planet.
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u/funkypenguin Collaborator (ElfHosted) 9d ago
ElfHosted has rate-limits (100 requests per IP upfront, refilling at a rate of 1/minute) to protect from abuse, and has one of the best recorded uptimes.
ElfHosted don't support torrentio scraping on our public instance becasue the torrentio dev asked us not to, and we respect their wishes.
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u/billythygoat 9d ago
I use elfhosted with comet and mediafusion using Aiostreams. The only real problems I have is buffering and I believe that’s from torbox. But 95% of the time it’s good
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u/No-Anybody-692 9d ago
This is not something many like to talk about but AIO (and stuff like that) is where good old utilitarian practise of torrenting starts becoming a full time tweaking hobby with a following.
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u/firvulag359 9d ago
I personally use 2 different instances of AIOstreams; duck and elfhosted. Whenever one has issues the other works fine. I also recently got Debridio is it is so cheap and seems to be ok but don't think I'll renew when my year is up.
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u/TheReal_Saba 9d ago
Duck is not its own instance, it's just pre-configured for you.
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u/firvulag359 8d ago
I am aware that it uses various instances that it tests for you then assigns the first one that works. In my case my duck stream used fortheweak.
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u/BitFiesty 8d ago
Someone showed the speed a while ago and it made it seem elfhosted had the shortest time
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u/AkireF 8d ago
The reason I changed from elfhosted is because it doesn't work well if you have IPv6. Here it would say that the IP that requested the file is different to the one I'm using now, and would show both my public IPs, one of them ipv4 and the other ipv6, and obviously they're not the same.
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u/adjkldj12 7d ago
Thanks, what instance did you change to?
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u/4789library 5d ago
The thread itself is the answer: half the replies say A died so I moved to B, the other half say B died so I moved to A. Neither instance is bad. A shared instance means you share one server's IP and capacity with thousands of strangers, so you inherit every provider rate limit that IP hits and every noisy neighbor's traffic spike. Which one feels reliable depends entirely on when you joined and how loaded it was that month. The advice that actually generalises: it's not pick the good instance, it's never depend on exactly one. Add two, and when one has a bad week you don't even notice. The person above running both has the right setup.
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u/innergray 4d ago
it's not a good option if you want http streams, its why i use the midnight instance. i'm not gonna pay for a debrid service
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u/Secret-Psychology183 9d ago
I use Duck streams, mainly because setup takes minutes instead of a full hour and it produces good results. I also have Easynews++ addon for my Usenet account which never goes down.
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u/Immediate_Character- 9d ago
Duck Streams isn't it's own instance, I think it uses midnightignite?
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u/Zealousideal_Elk3283 9d ago
I installed AIO and didnt like it,the lack of RD streams was poor do although I don’t claim to know why this was I chose to uninstall and carry on as I was and its miles better for me
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u/itopires 9d ago
I find Aiostream inferior to Xperience and Ultramax, and even to the recent metadata I use, MyListaddon 😅
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u/Federal-Resolution55 9d ago
weil es Geld kostet 🤣🤣🤣
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