How do meta links to the Discover page have to look?

[doingodswork]

Hello 🙂

There's a documentation page about "meta links": https://github.com/Stremio/stremio-addon-sdk/blob/35d52a47b74f050cc91ca423fa1a0eff6b5f3a4e/docs/api/responses/meta.links.md

It says you can link to a catalog like this: stremio:///discover/${transportUrl}/${type}/${catalogId}?${extra}

Now I've tried several URLs, with the most promising one being this one: stremio:///discover/https%3A%2F%2Fv3-cinemeta.strem.io%2Fmanifest.json/movie/top?genre=Action

But it doesn't work.

All the URLs I try lead to Stremio being opened, which is great, but when another catalog was previously selected, that just stays the same - Cinemata's "top" catalog is not being selected.

So:

1. What's wrong in the URL I tried?
2. Do you think it makes sense to add an example to the documentation page?

Background: With the documentation saying that genres, cast and director will be deprecated, I'm trying to build a catalog addon that uses the new links. So starting with replacing genres I'm trying to link to the Cinemata genre discover page.

[jaruba]

Hi, sorry for answering so late, I needed to dig into Stremio's code to see what we support from meta links.

It's not uncommon for us to add docs for planned features and wait to see the interest from the community developers before implementing them.

This is the case for meta links, as it was a planned feature, and you are the second community dev to ask about them until now.

What we currently support from meta links:

Stremio Desktop

• stremio://detail/... is supported completely
• stremio://board/ is supported completely, as it does not have any other path then stremio://board/
• stremio://discover/ is supported in a basic sense, as in, only the stremio://discover/ path
• stremio://search/... is not supported at all

Stremio Android

• does not currently support meta links at all

I've created issues for both Stremio Android and Stremio Desktop to add support (or the missing parts) for meta links. It's now in the pipeline and will be implemented.

[doingodswork]

Ah I see. I think documenting an upcoming feature, or even just a potentially upcoming one is totally fine. In this case though the alternative - using genres directly in a catalog response instead of using links with a link URL to a genre page - is already marked as deprecated, which really makes it sound like developers should implement for example genres with these new meta links as soon as possible.

So for now I have to fall back to use genres, but this gives me a feeling of uncertainty about when my addon will suddenly just break because genres will at some point not be supported by Stremio anymore.

And if I'm only the second developer to ask about it, this means all the other devs didn't care about the deprecation warnings yet? I hope that not too many addons break when you finally take action on the deprecations 🤞.

But thanks for putting it into the pipeline! That will greatly help in transitioning to the new model!

[jaruba]

@doingodswork

So for now I have to fall back to use genres, but this gives me a feeling of uncertainty about when my addon will suddenly just break because genres will at some point not be supported by Stremio anymore.

We take backward compatibility very seriously, as it is never our intention to break any addons. We currently even support the previous (very old) SDK, and there are ancient addons that still use it today.

[doingodswork]

Ok I see 👍