anchor

A native Stremio client for Linux and macOS. Sign in with your Stremio account: anchor shows your library and the catalogs of your addons, and plays every stream in your own mpv, so your mpv.conf, scripts (ModernZ, say), shaders and Dolby Vision handling (vo=gpu-next) apply untouched.

Demo

anchor-demo.mp4

Design

• anchor draws no video. Each stream opens in the mpv installed on your computer, which anchor follows over mpv's JSON IPC socket: where you are, and how it ended.
• Your Stremio account is the source of truth: the addons in its order, and its library. Progress goes back to it as you watch (every 30 s and when mpv closes), with Stremio's own rules, so Continue watching matches on your TV and phone.
• Stream addons' answers show as they wrote them (AIOStreams' formatting, emoji included), in their order. anchor ranks and filters nothing.
• Only direct links play (debrid, TorBox, HTTP). Torrents are counted and left out.
• The UI is Slint. Posters are decoded off the UI thread and only those near the screen are kept.
• The login key lives in the system keychain (Secret Service on Linux, Keychain on macOS), never in a file or a log. Addon and stream URLs, which carry keys, are never logged or shown.

What it does

Area	Supported
Home	The title to resume, Continue watching from your library, a row per catalog
Sidebar	Every catalog your addons offer, under Movies, Series and any other type, each section folds away
Catalogs	Full width, by genre, the next page as you scroll
Search	Every catalog that can search, as you type, and a full results screen
Titles	Movie and series pages: seasons, episodes, watched marks, the next episode selected, Mark watched
Streams	Every stream addon's answer, the stream you played last selected, why one failed
Playing	Your mpv, at the resume point, with addon subtitles in your languages; a now-playing bar
Settings	Account and Sync now, your addons (read-only), mpv and its arguments, subtitle languages, About

anchor brings no content of its own: it plays what your addons offer. Install, remove and configure addons on the Stremio website.

Install

anchor needs mpv: pacman -S mpv, apt install mpv, brew install mpv. On macOS it also looks in Homebrew's prefixes and /Applications/mpv.app, since apps started from Finder do not see your shell's PATH; Settings > Player takes any other path.

From Releases:

• Linux (x86_64 and arm64): anchor-<version>-<arch>.AppImage; chmod +x it and run it.
• macOS, Apple silicon and Intel: anchor-<version>-macos-universal.zip. Unzip it and move anchor.app to Applications. It is not notarized: open it once, then allow it in System Settings > Privacy & Security.

Building

cargo run --release

The quality gate, as CI runs it:

cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace
cargo deny check licenses

cargo test -- --ignored also runs the tests that need the network (the addon and API clients against Cinemeta, OpenSubtitles and the Stremio API, without an account) and the one that needs mpv.

Without an account

tools/fake-stremio.py serves a stand-in Stremio API, a catalog addon and a stream addon, with two titles left unfinished:

python3 tools/fake-stremio.py --media some-video.mp4
ANCHOR_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8099/api/ cargo run --release

Sign in with demo@example.com and demo. --posters DIR takes poster-*.jpg and still-*.jpg for the artwork. Signing in stores the fake key in the system keychain; remove it with secret-tool clear service anchor username fake-user.

The snapshot tour clicks through every screen without a display and saves each as a PNG:

ANCHOR_API_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8099/api/ cargo run --features snapshots -- --snapshots target/snapshots

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. Schibsted Grotesk is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (ui/fonts/OFL.txt); see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. anchor is an independent client for the Stremio addon protocol, not made by Stremio.