ramiro / plugin.video.elementum

Elementum add-on for Kodi

What it is

Elementum is a torrent finding and streaming engine. It doesn't go on torrent websites for legal reasons. However, it calls specially crafted add-ons (called providers) that are installed separately. They are normal Kodi add-ons, and thus can be installed/updated/distributed just like any other add-on.

This project is a fork of Quasar, created by scakemyer, which came from the well known, but no longer maintained Pulsar project from steeve. Thanks, guys, for your titanic work!

Supported platforms

• Windows 32/64 bits
• Linux 32/64 bits (starting Ubuntu 15.04)
• Linux ARM (armv6, armv7, armv8)
• OS X 32/64 bits
• Android ARM (4.4.x, and later), x86, x64, ARM, ARM64

Minimum supported Kodi version: 16 (Jarvis)

Download

See the Releases page. Do NOT use the Download ZIP button on this page.

Installation

• Go to Settings > Service settings > Control and enable both Application control options
• Restart Kodi if one or both options were not enabled
• Install Elementum like any other add-on

Build

The entire build process of Elementum is automated using Travis CI, and that's a good thing because it's quite a complicated one with many dependencies and repositories. Here's the stack from top to bottom:

• elementum - The Elementum daemon itself, built on top of the cross-compiler
• xgo - Docker images and utility to cross-compile Elementum binary for different platforms

Build status of each project

elementum daemon

For Developers' guide, please, refer to Elementum website

How it works

Elementum is a torrent finding and streaming engine. It doesn't go on torrent websites for legal reasons. It calls specially crafted add-ons (called providers) that are installed separately. They are normal Kodi add-ons, and thus can be installed/updated/distributed just like any other add-on.

Elementum is centered around media: it browses media from TheMovieDB and Trakt.tv. And so, when you decide you want to watch a media (i.e. given an TMDB ID), here's what Elementum does:

• Enumerate the installed providers
• Call each provider to find the media you want to watch (in parallel)
• Each provider returns a list of BT links they found
• Collects and de-duplicates all the links
• Goes on the BitTorrent network to find out the number of seeds and peers in real time (i.e. not provided by the provider)
• Finds out of which quality are the different links (thanks to their name)
• Ranks the links by quality and availability (Elementum privileges quality over availability, but it's not dumb. However, you can get a full list to choose from manually if you want, or disable 'Choose stream automatically' to always choose manually)
• Sends the chosen link to the BitTorrent streaming engine

All of this is done in less than 10s depending on your platform and timeout settings. Elementum is around 95% Go, and thus, it's fast. Very fast, actually.

The BitTorrent streaming engine is very resilient (or at least it's designed to be). It's built on top of anacrolix/torrent package.

Providers

As said before, Elementum relies on providers to find streams. Providers are easy to write, and can be as little as ~20 lines of Python code. As they are normal Kodi add-ons, which can have their own configuration (although it is not recommended because it complicates things).

Please note that for legal reasons, I won't discuss, develop nor distribute any providers connecting to illegal sources. So there is no need to ask me. While I can partake in general discussions regarding provider development, I won't do so for illegal sources specific problems.

FAQ

I can't code. How can I help?

Spread the word. Talk about it with your friends, show them, make videos, tutorials. Talk about it on social networks, blogs, etc...

The plugin doesn't work, what can I do?

Please search currently open and closed issues to see if it has already been reported and/or fixed. If not then add a new issue with a short but descriptive title, a detailed description and of course a link to the logs. If you don't know how to do that, just follow the guide at: http://kodi.wiki/view/Log_file/Easy. If you actually went through the logs and know the relevant part, you can instead paste that, as long as it's shorter than a hundred lines or so, and please enclose it in triple back-quotes for readability.

Can I seek in a video?

Yes, but it can fail.

What about seeding?

When watching a torrent, you will be seeding while you watch the stream.

Does it download the whole file? Do I need the space? Is it ever deleted?

Yes, yes and yes.

Can I keep the file after watching it?

Yes, change it in the add-on settings.

Can I set it to download directly to my NAS?

Yes, but you need to mount your NAS via the OS, not via Kodi.

Provider X is blocked in my country/ISP, how can I set another domain?

Sorry, I won't comment of specific providers.

Screenshots