🎬 Stremio Rust - Ultra-Fast & Lightweight Native Stremio Desktop Client

Welcome to Stremio Rust — the ultimate high-performance, battery-friendly, and lightweight desktop media center player designed to run the official Stremio experience native on your computer.

If you are looking for a fast Stremio desktop client that starts instantly, runs smoothly, and uses minimal system memory, Stremio Rust is the perfect alternative.

See the detailed changelog for the current build's implementation notes and known limitations.

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✨ Features and Functionality

🖥️ Modern Stremio Web UI Alignment

• Unified Navbar & Fixed Sidebar: Experience a premium layout featuring a top header panel with a search bar and user profile controls, alongside a fixed vertical navigation sidebar that reveals labels on hover.
• Discover Catalog Split Preview: Browse movies and TV series catalogs without leaving your current page. Clicking a media card slides open a detailed metadata panel featuring blurred poster art backdrops, overview, casting list, and genre filters.
• Advanced Series & Episode Picker:
  • Horizontal Seasons Row: Switch seasons instantly using capsule-shaped navigation buttons.
  • Real-Time Episode Search: Filter series episodes on-the-fly with a built-in search box.
  • Detailed Episode Cards: Each row displays preview thumbnails, sequence numbers, localized release dates, and watched checkmarks.
  • Dynamic Stream List Sheet: Switches smoothly to the stream provider sheet, complete with a ← Back to Episodes navigation link.

⚡ Rust-Powered Performance & Hardware Acceleration

• Custom Open-Source Stream Server: Unlike the official Stremio client which relies on a separate Node.js-based server.js backend, Stremio Rust embeds a custom, open-source stream server in-process. This eliminates the separate Node.js runtime and reduces process-management overhead.
• Low CPU & Battery Usage: Leveraging hardware-accelerated video decoding, this client utilizes your computer's GPU for video playback, keeping your CPU cool and extending your laptop's battery life.

Measured Idle Footprint (Windows x64)

The currently running native 1.0.0 release remains a single process, uses 358.6 MB of private working set, and averaged 0.19% CPU while idle. Its memory footprint is 455.8 MB (56.0%) lower than the retained official Stremio baseline.

Metric	Official Stremio baseline	Current native release
Processes	10	1
Private working set	814.4 MB	358.6 MB
CPU (5-second normalized average)	Not recorded	0.19%
Read/write I/O (5-second average)	Not recorded	0.00 / 0.00 MB/s
Threads	190	72
Handles	4,872	891
Loaded modules	201	108

The native values were captured on July 18, 2026 from the already-running, settled release process without changing its state. CPU and I/O are five-second samples; the remaining values are point-in-time readings. The official WebView2 values are the corresponding settled baseline retained from the previous performance investigation, so this remains an observational comparison rather than a controlled laboratory benchmark.

📦 Secure Offline Database Cache (Turso & Limbo)

• Local-First Database Storage: Stores all settings, historical logs, and metadata inside a single local database file (stremio.db) using the native turso engine.
• Memory-Based Image Loading: Poster artwork and thumbnails are cached as database blobs and decoded asynchronously on background thread pools (using the Rust image crate), keeping your UI rendering at a locked $60\text{ FPS}$ without disk lag.
• Privacy-Focused: No cloud synchronizations, trackers, or telemetry. Your viewing history, settings, and logs remain 100% private and stored locally.

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🚀 How to Build and Run the App

Windows x64 builds automatically download and verify the pinned optimized libmpv-2.dll; no media binaries are stored in this repository. Linux builds use the system's dynamic libmpv through pkg-config. The Windows runtime currently targets the x86-64-v3 CPU baseline.

1. Prerequisites

On Windows, install the x86_64-pc-windows-msvc Rust toolchain from rustup.rs and the Visual Studio 2022 C++ build tools/Windows SDK. On Linux, install Rust, pkg-config, the libmpv development package, and the native GUI packages listed in the release workflow.

2. Launching the Media Center

1. Open your terminal or shell command prompt.

2. Navigate to the cloned repository directory:

   cd stremio-native

3. Build and run the optimized release on Windows:

   cargo build --release --package stremio-native
   .\target\release\stremio-native.exe

   Or on Linux:

   cargo build --release --package stremio-native
   ./target/release/stremio-native

All settings, log consoles, and image databases are stored in the local ./storage/ folder inside the project directory.