An Android app to stream and download Movies, TV-Shows and Animes
This open source app can stream any media content from various sources
Disclaimer ⚠️
(from the official repository)
The app is purely for educational and personal use.
CloudStream 3 does not host any content on the app, and has no control over what media is put up or taken down. CloudStream 3 functions like any other search engine, such as Google. CloudStream 3 does not host, upload or manage any videos, films or content. It simply crawls, aggregates and displayes links in a convenient, user-friendly interface.
It merely scrapes 3rd-party websites that are publicly accessible via any regular web browser.
It is the responsibility of user to avoid any actions that might violate the laws governing his/her locality.
What are the risks in practice ?
Basically ? none, the content is hosted by the "providers", and if you don't distribute the content yourself, you are pretty much safe
A lot of misleading articles online try to scare people into buying a vpn subscription when the authors are earning a big commission (sometimes 100% of the vpn subscription).
VPN are useful for certain things but aren't a magical tool and most people don't need those
Here is a great video of Cyberstpatial talking about this:
Features:
Streaming
You can stream media from various sources (developed mainly by the community) by installing extensions, you can install them from here:
https://cloudstream.cf/repos/
Downloading
You can download media (movies, series and animes) files anywhere on your phone or external storage.
Downloading is kinda broken right now
Searching
When you search for a media, cloudstream will search every provider installed to see if it has that media or not.
You can change the list of used providers with the settings button in the search page
You can also enable foreign languages providers (such as french) under:
Settings page > Provider Languages
and tick the ones you want there
How does it work ?
Basicaly this app send requests to different websites (also called sources or providers) to find movies, series and animes and display them nicely in the app
100% free and no ads!
Cloudstream-3 (also refered to as cs-3) is open-source, that means that anyone can look at the code, their isn't any invasive data collection and anyone can create their own modiifed version (I did my own version !)
This app doesn't contain any ads and is completly free to download, as a result this app doesn't make any money from someone using the app.
But you can still help it's developement:
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By contributing to the code of the app itself (requires knowledge in Kotlin)
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By translating the app in another language
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By adding a star to the project on github
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By donating money to dependencies of the project (requires money) The devs of Cloudstream-3 don't accept donations
The User-Interface
The user interface is truly outstanding and is in my opinion better than some official streaming plateforms (I am looking at you amazon prime video)
I made those illustrations, don't they look great ?
The issues:
Even if this app is close to perfection, it isn't perfect (yet)
Indeed, the content is scrapped from various streaming websites, the main issue with this approach is that those websites can go down, change their url or even break.
This raises errors such as:
- "No link found" (meaning that the direct link can't be loaded)
Edit: This issue has been partially fixed, broken providers are disabled by the creators of cloudstream without having to update the app
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Not being able to stream to Google Cast (file format issue)
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Each provider is displayed independently, if you want to watch something you may have to check different sources
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Downloading doesn't work well: This issue is actively worked on
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**the devs only talk about 🍌and 🐵 (benene and monkee)
Avabality:
You can download this app on android, android TV and FireTV Stick it is unfortunately not avalaible on ios or on desktop
Installation:
First of all, you have to choose between two types of apps, the pre-release and the release, each of them have their pros and cons, you can switch at any time but you will lose your download history and settings.
let's compare those two options:
pre-release (the beta version)
- You have all of the latest features for the app
- some stuff in the app might break (like the player or navigation)
- Update are pushed at every small update (commit), so you have to install the app more often (it can be annoying for slow connections)
Release
- You don't have the lastest fixes and features
- You have stability, the app almost never break in release
- No need to update as often as in pre-release
Installing the apk
once you chose which variant of the app you want to use, head over to the release page
you now have to download the .apk file on this page (according to the choice you made earlier)
apk files are executable files that contains the application code, it is the only way to download this app since it's not on the play store
Once you downloaded the apk, open the file
A popup will tell you that the installation from unkown sources is disabled, this is normal behaviour.
Click the "settings" button of that popup and then click "allow this source"
You are done with the settings, you can go back and press the install button of the popup.
You successfuly installed Cloudstream-3 !
Now you need to install extensions if you want to watch content, go to that website:
https://cloudstream.cf/repos/
Choose the provider repository that you want to install (English, Multilingual, or anything from the list)
Click the install button as shown here:
It should ask to open the link with cloudstream, click yes
Now you should see a list of extension, click the ones that you want to install
Here are the best English ones (!engsug command in discord) :
ENGLISH
Movies/TV: superstream ⭐ (eng) sorastream (hex) loklok (hex) vidembed (eng) olgply (eng)
Anime: animixplay ⭐ (hex) gogo (eng) allanime (eng)
Live TV: time4tv ⭐ (hex) iptv-org (multi)
Superstream is imo really a must have for movies (but its not currently up to date)
