The video streaming finale, or why put.io is awesome

I ditched the whole self hosted mess and just bought a put.io subscription instead. This has become the smoothest, most no-nonsense video streaming experience I’ve ever had.

It’s a seedbox.

It transcodes.

It streams.

It has a web-based video player that lets me pick subtitles.

In cases when the subtitles aren’t recognized, or when I want to switch between audio tracks, I can always drag-n-drop the original file’s streaming URL from the browser straight to an mpv launcher like this:

It also has a open source third-party Android app that lets me browse and stream via mpv-android. As icing on the cake, this app supports casting to Chromecast-enabled TVs - everything Just Works (tm).

The above is only possible because put.io exposes a powerful, well-documented API for everyone to play with.

The web player is clean, snappy (see that, Google Drive team?) and has autoplay disabled by default (screw you, Netflix).

It’s refreshing to find software that works for instead of against its users these days.