Dropping DLNA/UPnP support in Stremio

It’s time for some news: we’re dropping DLNA/UPnP functionality (called “Cast to TV” in the menus) from Stremio, starting the next major versions (v4.5 onward).

But do not worry, you can still use Chromecast, and most modern TVs have built-in Chromecast support too!

Why are we doing this

There are a number of reasons for our decision:

• DLNA/UPnP is a complicated legacy protocol with little real-world documentation;
• A lot of TVs have their own quirks and do not comply with the protocol;
• To support it, we have to test on a lot of different TVs, and there’s no practical/cheap way for us to do that;
• Stremio addons can serve many different formats, while each TV supports a different set of formats; testing every single conversion case is close to impossible;
• We’d rather spend the effort on new features such as remote control and downloading;
• Chromecast is much easier to support and getting more and more common.

In short, trying to properly support DLNA/UPnP has wasted way to much of our time, that could’ve been spent on other ways to improve Stremio.

What are the alternatives

• Use VLC through the “Play in external player” functionality (right click on the video while playing) and cast from there.
• On Android, you can use the functionality to open in an external player, together with Web Video Caster; keep in mind, the Android app never supported DLNA/UPnP anyway.
• Use Chromecast. We’re actively maintaining our Chromecast support and most modern TVs (especially Android TVs) support the Chromecast protocol out of the box.
• With the plans to completely open-source the code for our next major version, enthusiastic users can try solving the problem themselves.

Summary

Maintaining a complicated product such as Stremio requires the occasional sacrifice, and unfortunately we cannot support everything.

Fortunately, there are useful alternatives in this case, and we believe the impact would be minimal.