Stream TV
A self-hosted television system that turns IPTV subscriptions, DRM channels, and live streams into a clean, Netflix-like experience, kept in sync across every device you own. One central brain and native apps for every screen.
Three parts, one system
The golden rule: the server owns the content, the apps just display it. Edit a channel once and every device picks it up: instantly if it's watching, otherwise on its next refresh.
The Server
The brain. Master channel list, self-healing stream resolver, account pools, TV guide, catalog crawler, IPTV relay, and user accounts. Runs 24/7 on a home NAS.
Node.js · TypeScript · DockerDesktop App
The living-room player. Single channel, a four-tile grid or a free mosaic, recording, DRM, movies & series, and an mpv engine that plays what browsers can't.
Electron · mpv · WindowsAndroid App
A native phone / tablet / TV client with the same content, Picture-in-Picture, background playback, and TV-launcher support.
Kotlin · mpvAround the core sit a few small helper tools for checking accounts, probing streams, and keeping an eye on things. They aren't part of the system; they just make running it easier.
The Server
Runs as a Docker container on an always-on home server. It holds the content, fixes dead streams, juggles your IPTV accounts, crawls catalogs, relays feeds, and manages who can see what.
🗂️Central channel store & sync
One master list for every device. Add, rename, delete, reorder, or re-group a channel once and every app reflects it. A fresh server auto-seeds from your existing library, so there's no re-typing.
🎛️Admin control room
A full browser panel: channels, groups, playlists on their own page, bulk actions on whatever you tick, accounts & profiles, restriction toggles, and a one-click "Diagnose all" sweep that auto-hides dead channels.
🔧Self-healing resolver
When a link dies, the server finds a fresh one automatically and shares the fix with every device. It knows token-scraped, RTÉ DRM, IPTV-org, master-playlist, and Stalker channels apart.
⚡Browserless token resolver
Channels that hide their real stream behind a rotating token are cracked in pure HTTP + AES with no headless browser, resolving in about a second instead of thirty.
🩺Channel diagnosis
Instead of "it's broken," a staged probe reports the real reason (origin refused, 403 geo-blocked, 401 max-connections, dead host, wrong codec) and reads a panel's exact response codes correctly. A stream that trickles but never really plays counts as broken too.
🔁Xtream TS relay
A one-connection IPTV account is fanned out to all your devices from a single shared upstream, spliced cleanly across the panel's constant reconnects, so the account never fights itself. When a feed struggles, the relay works through a ladder of fallbacks before it gives up.
👥Account pools
Attach several accounts for the same line-up and the server spreads channels across them, ranks the healthy ones, grades expiry dates, and clears out lapsed accounts in one click. Dead accounts stop being retried.
🌍Per-playlist VPN exit
Choose which playlists leave through a VPN. The server swaps exits automatically when a panel blocks one, holds the exit steady while you're watching, and runs its own checks over the same route.
📊Status page
One page shows live faults, the VPN state, and recent crashes (including the near misses), with buttons to dismiss or rotate each one.
⏪Catch-up / timeshift
Rewind live TV. For panels that support archive, the server serves a past broadcast on demand and you can seek through it with the arrow keys. It's banked to disk within your free space, so playback stays smooth when the source doesn't.
🎬Movies & Series catalog
One unified database indexes the VOD libraries of all your accounts, over 230,000 movies and 85,000 series, into a single poster catalog (categories, titles, seasons, episodes), searchable across every line, with a nightly refresh that skips what's already fresh and full per-profile gating.
📰TV guide
A full now/next guide from XMLTV sources, docked beside the channel list and rebuilt whenever the line-up changes. Off by default and switched on per playlist, so it only loads what you actually use.
👤Accounts, profiles & safe mode
Per-user logins with signed tokens. Each profile only sees the groups & content it's granted. Restricted content is never even sent to a device that shouldn't have it. Safe mode is on every launch.
📥Master playlists & bulk import
Register M3U playlists, browse their groups before importing, and pull channels by country from IPTV-org, with scheduled auto-refresh and deletion-respecting re-imports.
💾Backup & snapshots
One-click export/import of the whole configuration, plus automatic gzip snapshots (keeps the last 20) so you can roll back to any recent state.
📡Live-reload push
When a channel you're watching changes, the server pushes a live event and the app restarts just that stream in place, with no full reload.
🛰️Resilience & edge relay
Apps cache the last-good list for when the server blinks. A tiny Cloudflare edge proxy lets the server reach IPTV panels an ISP actively blocks, with no rate-limiting.
The Desktop App
A Windows app with a TV-like interface for live channels and on-demand movies & series. Under the hood it plays through mpv, so the hard parts of streaming stay out of sight.
📚Grouped library
A three-column layout splits Live TV from Movies & Series. Collapsible groups, search-as-you-type, drag-to-reorder, a hint showing which playlist a channel came from, and it resumes your last channel on launch.
🔲Multi-view & mosaic
Watch up to four channels at once in a grid, or drop them wherever you like in a free mosaic. Click a tile for its audio, press F to send one tile fullscreen without breaking up the group.
🎞️mpv playback engine
Live, catch-up, and films all play through mpv. It decodes MPEG-2, VC-1, and interlaced feeds that browsers refuse, with no re-encoding, and closes streams properly when you leave, so an account slot is never held by a window you forgot about.
🔊Audio & subtitle tracks
Switch alternate audio tracks and toggle subtitles instantly, without reconnecting. Embedded VOD subtitle tracks are included.
🍿Movies & Series
A rich poster-grid catalog across all your accounts, with title / season / episode detail, favourites, a search overlay, real seeking, and per-title resume. Press Back over a film to pause it; Resume picks up exactly where you were.
⏺️Recording
Record any channel to disk (ffmpeg stream-copy, no quality loss). Recording survives token expiry, has a dedicated browser window, scheduled recordings, and custom filename templates.
🔐DRM playback
Widevine DASH and ClearKey channels play through Shaka, and RTÉ live works from anywhere because its manifest and rotating per-programme license resolve through the server's proxy.
🎙️IPTV & Stalker playback
Raw Xtream MPEG-TS plays through the server relay; MAC portals resolve per-connect; multi-audio TS streams get a proper track picker.
🌐CORS-neutral & hotlink-friendly
Strips restrictive CORS headers and injects the per-channel Referer/Origin gated CDNs expect, on the playlist, the AES keys, and the segments alike.
🖥️Screen-friendly
Keeps playing when the window is minimised, shows the real decoded resolution beside the channel name, and draws at the right size on mixed-DPI multi-monitor setups.
🔒Accounts & safe mode
Optional per-user login scopes the library to your profile; restricted content stays server-side invisible, and safe mode starts on every launch.
The Android App
A native Kotlin / Compose client of the same server, playing through mpv. Built for phones, tablets, and Android TV, with true feature parity.
📋Same content, native UI
Grouped channel list with search and now-playing lines, plus the full Movies & Series poster catalog with season/episode detail, favourites, and resume. It launches straight into the last channel you watched and keeps a live picture on screen while you browse.
🖼️PiP & background playback
Keep watching in a floating Picture-in-Picture window or with the screen off.
📺Android TV launcher
Behaves like a real TV app with full D-pad navigation, player controls within reach of the remote, and remote-friendly audio / subtitle pickers.
🔲Multi-view
A 2×2 grid with per-tile audio, just like the desktop.
⏱️Preemptive token renewal
A stall watchdog plus link refresh that fires before expiry, so playback doesn't hiccup on rotating tokens.
🎞️mpv playback engine
Everything plays through a built-in mpv engine with hardware decoding, so even 50fps channels stay perfectly in sync.
⏪Catch-up on the go
Rewind live into catch-up and watch films with the archive banked to the device's storage, sized to the free space you have.
📶Watch from anywhere
Streams locked to a single IP are unlocked on the device itself, so you can connect from anywhere, over 5G on the go, not only on your home network.
Why it's more than a playlist
Every hard part of "just watching a stream" has been engineered away.
A personal-use system for streams you have the right to watch. DRM playback uses the platform's official Widevine licensing with your own account credentials. Nothing is bypassed.