For the Oriole Android app · Last updated 3 September 2026
If you read one thing, read this. Oriole does not get films from a company's computer. It gets them from other people's computers, in small pieces, at the same time. So the number that matters most is how many people are sharing the file you picked. Nearly every result says it, under the title.
Lots of people sharing means it starts quickly. Very few people sharing means it starts slowly, or does not start at all. That one idea explains most of the problems on this page.
A torrent is a way of sending a file between people instead of downloading it from a company. Think of a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of one shop posting you the whole box, a hundred people who already own the puzzle each post you a few pieces. Your phone collects the pieces and puts the picture together.
While your phone is collecting pieces, it also hands out the pieces it already has to other people who are collecting the same puzzle. Everyone helps everyone. The whole group of people sharing one file is called a swarm.
Netflix and YouTube keep every video on their own computers, in enormous buildings built for the job. Those computers are always on, always fast, and there is a copy of the video near wherever you live. That is why a video starts the instant you tap it.
Oriole has no such building. It gets pieces from ordinary people's computers and phones, wherever they happen to be. What that buys you: nobody decides what is allowed in the catalogue, nothing is removed because a contract expired, and there is no account and no monthly bill. What it costs you: the speed depends entirely on who happens to be sharing right now. A popular file can be faster than Netflix. A file that four people have can be painfully slow.
It means five other computers currently have that file and are willing to send you pieces of it. This is the single most useful number on the screen. It matters more than the file size, more than the quality, and more than the year.
More people sharing means more pieces arriving at once, so the video starts sooner and is less likely to stall. Fewer people means fewer pieces, so you wait. A zero is the strongest warning on the row, though it is not quite a verdict: the number is what the index saw the last time it looked rather than a live reading, so it is occasionally out of date in both directions. The app will still let you tap it. It is the best predictor there is of a tap that ends in a spinner.
You will meet the word seeders in the search filters, where there is a "Min seeders" setting. A seeder is a person who has the complete file and is sharing it, so it is the same idea under an older name. Setting a floor there is a good habit: it hides the results that were never going to start.
A few results say "direct download" instead of a people count. Those come with the torrent's own description file, so the app does not have to ask other people for it before anything can begin. The film itself still arrives from the swarm, but the waiting-to-be-told-what-to-fetch step is skipped, which is why the people count is not what holds these up and why they usually start quickly.
| People sharing | What to expect |
|---|---|
| 30 or more | A crowd. This is the point where the app stops warning you that a file may be slow. |
| 10 to 30 | Usually fine for a normal sized film. Give it up to a minute. |
| Under 10 | Slow, and more likely to stall partway. Worth looking for another version. |
| 0 | Very likely nothing. The app still lets you try, but choose another if there is one. |
These are guides, not promises, and size is the other half of the sum. Thirty people sharing a 700 MB episode is comfortable; thirty people sharing a 40 GB 4K film is not. Two people on fast home broadband can also beat twenty people on slow phone connections. But as a rule, the bigger number wins.
They are sizes, smallest first. Each step up is about a thousand times bigger than the one before it.
| Size | Roughly |
|---|---|
| A few KB | A page of writing. |
| A few MB | A photo, or a song. |
| 700 MB | An old TV episode, or a low quality film. |
| 1 to 4 GB | A normal film in good quality. This is what most films are. |
| 8 to 20 GB | A very high quality film, or a whole season of a show. |
| 40 GB and up | A 4K film at full quality. Large enough to fill a phone. |
A useful habit: when two versions of the same film are listed, the smaller one starts faster and looks slightly worse. On a phone screen the difference is often hard to see at all.
No. There is no sign up, no email address, no password, and no free trial that turns into a bill. Oriole does not know who you are and has no way to find out. You will never be asked to make an account, on this app or anywhere else.
This is the most common set of questions by a wide margin, so it is the longest section. Almost all of it comes back to the same cause.
Nearly always for one reason: you picked a big file that very few people are sharing. A 4 GB film with five people sharing has to pull a lot of data through a very narrow pipe. Three minutes of waiting is normal in that situation, and it is not a sign that anything is broken.
What to do, in the order that works best:
A gold recommended tag on that screen marks the copy the app itself would open: the one most likely to start soonest out of the versions a phone can actually use. That is the same question the order of the list answers, so the tag is normally on the top row. It sits lower only when the first row is something a phone should not open, such as a 4K copy far beyond what the screen can show, or one the index flagged as implausibly small for what it claims. On those few rows the tag is the better guide, not the order.
The exact words are "The picture can't keep up on this phone. A smaller or x264 version plays cleanly." Sometimes it names the culprit instead, with a line that starts "Drawing HEVC (x265) in software" and ends with the same advice.
This one is not about your internet, and it is the easiest message on the page to read backwards. It means your phone cannot decode this particular video fast enough. Decoding is the work of turning the compressed file back into pictures. The app only shows this message when it has already checked that the download is comfortably ahead of playback, so waiting longer will not help.
It usually happens with 4K files, or with files whose name contains x265 or HEVC. Those save space by being harder to decode, which is a good trade on a modern television and a bad one on a phone.
The fix is to go back and choose a different version: one that is smaller, or one whose name contains x264 instead. Those play cleanly on almost any phone. Nothing is wrong with your device, and nothing is wrong with the app. That file is heavier than that phone can handle, and that is all it is.
The message for a slow download is a different one, so you can tell them apart. That one is a single line reading something like "Not keeping up yet · Needs 6.0 MB/s, getting 2.0 MB/s". That is the network, and for that one a version with more people sharing is the answer.
There were two different causes, and one of them was a real bug.
If you are on an old version of Oriole and an older phone, update the app. Files larger than 2 GB were genuinely broken on 32-bit phones, which is to say older ones. The download would climb to a little under 2 GB, stop there, and the film would never start at all. That was fixed in version 1.7.0, so updating clears it, and the app repairs the half-broken copy on your phone by itself. Phones from roughly the last several years were never affected.
If you are already up to date, a stall is the same story as a slow start: the people who were sharing with you have gone offline. Torrents are made of other people, and other people close their laptops. Go back and pick a version with more people sharing.
That file has nobody sharing it, or almost nobody. There is nothing to download from. It can happen even to results that look perfectly normal, because the list you are searching remembers files that were popular months ago and have since been forgotten.
The app usually tells you which it is. "Nobody sharing this file is online right now." means the file is known but everyone with it is offline. "Nothing has answered for this file. Either nobody is sharing it, or this network is blocking the trackers." can also mean your connection is the problem, which is worth checking if it happens to everything you tap rather than to one file. A tracker is a kind of directory: a computer your phone asks who currently has the file, so that it knows where to start. Some office and school networks block them.
A result can also warn you before you tap it, in red: "Nobody was sharing this when the index last looked, so it may not start." Take that at its word and pick another version.
Yes, and this is the part people are most often surprised by, so here it is plainly: streaming a film downloads the whole film.
On Netflix or YouTube, a low quality version is sent to your phone when your connection is poor, so a two hour film might cost you a fraction of what it would at full quality. That does not happen here. There is no smaller version being quietly sent instead. If the file is 3 GB, watching it costs 3 GB of your allowance, every time. Watching half of it still downloads a good deal more than half.
Because of that, Wi-Fi only is switched on when you install the app. It does not refuse to work on mobile data, it asks first. Tap something while you are on mobile data and you get a box headed "You're on mobile data", saying "A film is several gigabytes. Wi-Fi-only is on in Settings; starting this now will use your data allowance", with "Start anyway" and "Cancel". You can turn the setting off in Settings, and it is worth understanding before you do.
One exception, in case you set up Track Topics later: those scheduled checks are not covered by the Wi-Fi-only setting and run on whatever connection the phone has. They are small text requests rather than downloads, so the cost is nothing like a film, but they are not zero either.
While you watch, the pieces are kept in the app's own storage. The Files screen is where you see that. It lists exactly what Oriole is holding on your phone and how much room each item is taking, and it lets you delete any of it, one at a time or all at once. The total is also shown in the top bar of the main screen, so you can notice it without going looking.
Files you deliberately chose to save are different. They go into an Oriole folder, with a folder inside it for each release, so an album stays an album instead of scattering through a year of downloads. Settings can point that anywhere you like — Music, an SD card, wherever the folder picker reaches — and changing it only affects new saves; nothing already on your phone is moved.
Where the Oriole folder itself sits depends on how old your phone is. On Android 10 and newer it is inside your phone's real Downloads folder, where any other app can open it, and everything in it stays there even if you uninstall Oriole. They are yours. On Android 9 and older, Android would not let an app write there without asking for broad access to your storage, so the folder belongs to Oriole instead and is removed if you uninstall the app. Either way the app tells you the real location when the save finishes, rather than always claiming Downloads.
There is a third option on each release, "To folder...", which copies it into any folder you pick. Those copies live wherever you put them, on any version of Android, and uninstalling does not touch them.
Clearing the app's storage never touches saved copies. The other side of that is that Oriole has no way to delete them either: to remove a saved file, use whatever Files or My Files app came with your phone.
Yes. Tap "Cast to TV (beta)" in the player and Oriole looks for televisions on your network. It finds Chromecasts, and it also talks directly to most smart TVs made in the last ten years or so, including the majority of Samsung, LG, Sony, Philips and Panasonic sets. Your phone keeps the file and feeds it to the television, so the phone needs to stay on and on the same network while you watch.
One honest label first: the button says beta. Casting works — it is the newest part of the app, and televisions vary far more than phones do, so some models still have rough edges being filed down. It is free while it says beta. If your set misbehaves, the address at the bottom of this page wants to hear which model it is.
Each television in the list says what it will cost you, and there are three things it can say. "Plays the file directly · phone stays idle" is the best case, and only a smart TV gets it: the set fetches the film itself and your phone can go to sleep. "Streams via this phone · no re-encoding" is what a Chromecast gets even at its best, because every byte goes through the phone on its way to the TV. "Converts on this phone · uses battery" means the television cannot handle that particular file, so the phone rewrites it as it goes. That works, and it is the one that drains the battery. A set that cannot play the file at all is greyed out instead; the next question is about that.
A smart TV reached directly plays the file itself — nothing converts it on the way, which is what makes that the cheap path — so it can only play what its own decoders understand. Most sets of the last decade take MP4 and MKV with ordinary stereo sound. The two things they refuse most often are AVI files, usually older Xvid releases, and Dolby soundtracks (AC-3 and E-AC-3), which some sets will not decode: the set either refuses the file or plays the picture without its sound.
Oriole does not convert for a smart TV, and it says so rather than trying. A set that will not take the file is greyed out in the cast menu, with "This TV does not accept AVI files" underneath. A set that took the file and then choked on it reports that it accepted the file but could not play it.
Three ways round it. If the same television also has Chromecast built in, Oriole notices and switches to that path on its own, converting on the phone at the cost of battery. A Chromecast plugged into any set does the same. And on the phone itself everything plays — AVI, Xvid, AC-3, E-AC-3 and DTS all decode locally, with sound — so the film is never lost, only the big screen.
Not at the moment, and Oriole says so rather than pretending to look. If one is on your Wi-Fi it appears in the cast menu greyed out, with the reason written underneath it.
The short version is that both speak their own casting protocol and neither accepts the two open ones Oriole uses. A Fire TV takes casts through Amazon's own protocol; a Roku through its own. Neither is on this app's list.
There is a way round it on a Fire TV: install a player app on the stick itself — VLC and Kodi are both on Amazon's store — and point it at this phone over the network. It is not one tap, and it works today.
Because a tap would not start anything yet, and the menu says which of the three reasons it is.
The commonest is that the film has not started. Casting a film the app has barely begun downloading is what makes a television give up on it a few seconds in, so the button waits. You can still pick a TV while it is faded — the film goes over on its own as soon as there is enough of it to play.
The other two: nothing has answered on the Wi-Fi yet, or nothing is there; and the phone has no address on a local network at all, which is what mobile data looks like. Nothing can be found from there.
The app's own answer is the right one to start with: "A Chromecast, or any TV that appears in other apps' cast menus, has to be switched on and on the same Wi-Fi as this phone."
In practice that is almost always the network. Many homes have two Wi-Fi names, often something like "Home" and "Home-5G", and a phone on one cannot see a television on the other. Put both on the same one and try again. If the phone is on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi it will find nothing at all.
Two other things to check: the television has to be properly on rather than asleep, and some routers have a "guest network" or a setting that stops devices on the network from seeing each other.
Two features are switched off when you install the app and stay off until you turn them on. Both need an API key of your own, which is a code you get from another company and paste into Settings. Neither costs you anything if you never set one up, and the ordinary keyword search works without either.
This lets you search in your own words, the way you would ask a person, instead of typing an exact title. It needs an API key from a company called OpenRouter. That key is billed to you, not to us: the spending is on your own account, and we never see it. Making one takes a few minutes, and there are free models you can try it with. Without a key, this feature does nothing at all.
One thing worth knowing before you turn it on. To recognise a title you have only half remembered, the AI can run a web search. On the default settings that is usually at most one search per question, and only when the model decides it needs one, so many questions involve none at all. Turning the depth up to "Thorough" raises that to two or more.
That search is carried out by OpenRouter rather than by the app: your question goes to OpenRouter and nowhere else, and OpenRouter passes on what it needs. So your question can reach a search engine as well as an AI model. You can switch it off entirely in Settings, and it never happens without a key.
A topic is a standing question that the app asks again for you on a schedule. You might save "new Blender open movies" and ask for it to be checked once a week. Choices are every 12 hours, daily, weekly or monthly. Anything new is collected for you, and you get a quiet notification when there is something to see.
It uses the same OpenRouter key, so it spends your credit each time it runs. Two things stop that becoming a nasty surprise. You choose how often it runs. And a phone that stops being used winds the topics down on its own: after two weeks without the app being opened they slow to at most one check a week, and after a month they stop altogether and the app tells you they have. So a forgotten topic can still spend a little for a few weeks, but it cannot keep going indefinitely. You can pause or delete any topic on its own at any time, and Settings has a switch that pauses all of them.
Here is the straight answer, with no winking.
Oriole is a player and a downloader. It hosts nothing, it stores nothing on any server of ours, and it has no catalogue of its own. It is a tool, in the way a web browser or a video player is a tool.
The library it comes with is deliberately uncontroversial. It holds work that is free for everyone to use: early cinema that is out of copyright, LibriVox audiobook recordings read by volunteers, the Blender open movies, Linux installers. Using Oriole exactly as it arrives is entirely above board.
Point it somewhere else and the answer changes, because what you access is then your choice. Copyright law differs from country to country and it is your local law that applies to you, not ours. Downloading a film that somebody still sells is against the law in most places. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we are not going to lecture you about it either. It is your responsibility.
Yes, in one specific way, and it is worth being clear about it rather than burying it.
Taking part in a swarm means your phone talks directly to the other computers sharing that file. To do that, they have to know where to send the pieces, so your IP address is visible to everyone else in that swarm. An IP address is the number your internet connection uses, roughly like a return address on an envelope. It does not carry your name, but it does identify your connection, and your internet provider knows whose connection it is.
This is not something Oriole does. It is how BitTorrent works, in every app that uses it, and it has been true since it was invented. There is no version of file sharing between people where the people are invisible to each other.
If that matters for your situation, use a VPN, which is a service that routes your connection through another computer first, or do not use BitTorrent software. The privacy policy sets out exactly what is sent where, in more detail than this page has room for.
Nothing. There are no adverts, no analytics, no tracking, and no advertising ID. Your settings, your bookmarks and your keys stay on your phone. When you first open the app it asks one question, where files should come from, and until you answer it the app contacts nothing at all.
After that, your search words go to the source you chose, and to nobody else. If that source is the built-in library, the server answering is one we run, so it sees your search words and your IP address the way any website you visit sees your IP address. We keep short lived logs to keep the service working and we do not build profiles from them, because we have no account to attach one to. The one other thing the app fetches is a public list of tracker addresses, at most once a day. That request carries nothing about you, your searches or what you are watching, though like any web request your IP address is visible to whoever serves the file. The privacy policy is the full and binding version of all of this.
Write to orioleandroidapp@gmail.com. It helps to say which phone you have, what you tapped, and what happened instead.