sia-stream v1.0.8

Sia Stream

An easy to use interface to manage your Plex library on Sia.

Motivation

Sia is a decentralized storage network that allows users to rent out cloud storage at an ultra competitive price. As a permissionless network and open marketplace, it offers some key advantages that makes it a compelling offering to home media server operators.

1. Cheaper Storage

The price to store a single TB on Amazon S3 or Google's Cloud Platform is around \$20/TB. On Sia, storage providers (hosts) are able to set their own prices, while storage users (renters) each individually select the hosts they choose to store their files with.

The current cost of storing 1 TB of data on the Sia network is $0.89 (as of Nov 26 2019). Even considering a 3x data redundancy (to account for storage providers that go offline), the cost per TB on the Sia network is only around $2-3/TB.

2. No Deplatforming

Any experienced Plex user that has tried hosting their data on Amazon Drive Unlimited or Google Drive Unlimited know that both companies have since changed their policies to remove their unlimited offerings. Users have even been banned by centralized cloud-storage companies due to violations in their "policy".

Since Sia is fully decentralized, it means no single authority can deny you access to storing and streaming files from the Sia platform. In fact, even if Sia's parent company shuttered its doors today, the network would continue to function normally.

How Sia Stream Works

At its core, Sia Stream is meant to work alongside siad, the daemon that interfaces with the Sia network. This means you will need to run an instance of siad in order to use Sia Stream. You can find the latest binary here.

What Sia Stream does is manage some of the complexities of dealing with siad. This includes helping you setup a wallet, manage storage contracts, auto-add media files from your local library to the upload queue, as well as optionally removing the files from your local library once the file is uploaded to Sia.

Sia Stream Architechture

When you start Sia Stream, the application will automatically create a folder in the same directory as the binary. Inside, you will find the following config files in JSON:

renter.json - manages the allowance state
siad_connection.json - manages the siad settings
stream_config.json - siastream configuration
user_config.json - general user config

Each JSON file isolates the configuration detail for a subset of Sia Stream's functionality. Generally, users aren't expected to have to touch those files. However, if those config files are modified manually, the user will have to restart Sia Stream in order for the updated configuration to go into effect.