How It Works

What happens between clicking play and a stream appearing — and what Core Builds does differently.

The Pipeline

When you hit play in Stremio, a lot happens in under a second.

1. Stremio sends a stream request

   Stremio asks your AIOStreams instance: “give me streams for Breaking Bad S01E01.” AIOStreams receives the IMDB ID and the query type (movie, series episode, anime).

2. AIOStreams queries scrapers in parallel

   All enabled scrapers fire simultaneously — Comet, MediaFusion, TorBox, Zilean, Knaben, and any others you have configured. Each returns a raw list of streams: torrents, Usenet NZBs, debrid links.

   Without Core Builds, this already produces 50–200+ results in no particular order.

3. ESEs remove junk

   Excluded Stream Expressions run first. Streams matching any ESE are removed entirely before ranking starts. Core Builds standard ESEs kill: CAM recordings, YouTube rips, 3D streams, sub-720p resolutions, season packs on episode queries, bad NZBs, and more.

   Standard: 24 ESEs. Lite: 12 (hard kills only — no quality gates).

4. ISEs boost priority streams

   Included Stream Expressions pin certain streams to the top of the sorted list regardless of ranking. Core Builds ISEs boost: streams from your library (continue watching), cached streams, and English-language streams.

5. PSEs score everything else

   Preferred Stream Expressions assign a score to each remaining stream. Core Builds uses IQR Tukey fence PSEs — they compare each stream’s bitrate against the statistical distribution of all streams for that title, then rank within the “normal” window highest.

   Streams are scored into tiers: S (REMUX/high-bitrate), A, B, C, D (low-bitrate/low-quality).

6. Deduplication

   Identical files from different scrapers are merged into a single result. Core Builds uses aggressive smart deduplication with tiebreakers: seeder count (torrents) and age (Usenet).

7. Formatter renders the display

   Each stream’s metadata is formatted into the title and description lines you see in Stremio. Core Builds formatters show: resolution, codec, HDR type, audio, file size, bitrate, cache status, release group, and more.

8. Sorted results returned to Stremio

   Stremio receives the final list — typically 10–20 clean, ranked results. The best option for your setup is at the top.

---

What Core Builds Adds

Vanilla AIOStreams with default settings returns raw, unsorted results. Core Builds layers a full quality stack on top:

IQR Tukey Fence PSEs

Bitrate-based ranking using real statistics across all streams for a title — not hardcoded cutoffs. Adapts to thin libraries and new releases via the pow() decay window.

Core Builds Expression Layer

24 ESEs remove junk before ranking ever starts. 3 ISEs pin library, cached, and English streams to the top. IQR Tukey fence PSEs score everything else by bitrate percentile against real peers.

Release Group Scoring

37 inline ranked patterns per template (score range −200 to +100) plus 174 additional patterns synced from Vidhin05’s release database. Elite groups (FraMeSToR, FLUX, BHDStudio) surface above generic encodes automatically.

Device Profiles

Samsung TV, Apple TV, Fire Stick templates hard-exclude codecs and HDR formats the device can’t play — no more silent playback failures from AV1 or DV on unsupported hardware.

Usenet Priority

Cached TorBox Usenet NZBs are boosted above standard debrid results via a dedicated PSE. The Boost Cached Usenet PSE ensures Usenet results never silently sort below torrents.

pow() Age Decay

Bitrate windows for new releases expand over time using an exponential decay function — ±40% tolerance on day 0, narrowing to ±2% by day 60 as more encodes appear.

---

PSE / ESE / ISE at a Glance

Type	Role	Count (Standard)	Count (Lite)
ESE	Remove — stream is excluded from results	24	12
ISE	Boost — stream jumps to top regardless of score	3	3
PSE	Rank — stream gets a quality score	varies by template	varies by template

ESEs run first, then ISEs, then PSEs. A stream matched by an ESE never reaches PSE scoring.

---

Why Lite Returns More Results

Lite templates remove the quality-gate ESEs (low bitrate, low seeders, upscaled 4K, bad BluRay encodes). Only hard kills remain (CAM, YouTube, 3D, sub-720p). More results come through — but without quality filtering, some bad encodes will appear.

Use Lite when: your library is thin, you’re on a shared host, or you’re debugging why a specific title returns no results on the standard template.

→ Expression Layer deep-dive for the full technical reference