Storage and libraries

Choose durable storage separately from the application runtime and preserve it during removal.

What actually uses your disk

Every section chooses one of two ways to fetch media, and you set it per section.

**Stream it** plays without downloading and uses no disk space at all. A forty-gigabyte

film starts in seconds. Nothing is kept afterwards.

**Download and keep it** fetches the whole release, repairs damaged articles, unpacks it,

and keeps it. It plays instantly ever after and costs disk — roughly 140 MB for an album,

500 MB or more for an audiobook.

The defaults are chosen around how each kind of media is usually posted:

| Section | Default | Why |

| --- | --- | --- |

| Film, Series | Stream it | Large, and posted in a form that streams well. |

| Music | Stream it | Albums stream track by track. See below. |

| Unrated | Stream it | Nothing is written to disk. |

| Audiobooks, Comics | Download and keep it | Small, and routinely posted in compressed archives that cannot be streamed. |

This surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly: **an album does not need to be

downloaded to play, and a RAR is not an obstacle.**

Most music is posted either as loose audio files or as *stored* RAR volumes — split into

parts, but not compressed. The bytes of each track sit inside verbatim, so the player seeks

straight to the track it wants and reads it out. Nothing is extracted and nothing is

written to your disk. That is how a full album plays track by track on Stream it.

A *compressed* RAR is different: the audio is deflated across the whole archive, so no

single track can be read without unpacking all of it. Those cannot be streamed by anyone.

When an album turns out to be available only in that form and Music is set to Stream it,

**the album is refused and the television tells you** — naming Download and keep it as the

setting that would open it. It is your decision whether that album is worth the disk.

Nothing is ever downloaded on your behalf to work around a Stream it setting.

The Downloads screen reports what is on disk and groups repeated copies of the same title

together, so five postings of one album show up as what they are. Removing a group deletes

the files, not just the record of them.